Division 10's News of the Week

A big happy new year to everyone and an even bigger Welcome back! By the excitement of the children and their enthusiastic writing, I could see that they had a wonderful holiday and did lots of fun activities. It was great getting hugs and seeing everyone again. This past week we spent a lot of time on talking about what a resolution was. That it is like making a goal or a promise for them to keep getting better at things both at school and at home. We made wishes for our world as well! The children made some wonderful goals for themselves. They had to really think about what they were doing well and what they wanted to improve upon. I told them sometimes it is easy to make the goal but it is difficult to keep it...as us adults all know all to well!! But we keep persevering and trying! One of our classroom goals that we talked about was being "flexible", that sometimes change happens and we just have to roll with it without getting frustrated. I think our class does a very good job of this!!!

This week we also talked about Penguins. That will be our new science unit. We read a picture book about a penguin and then talked about how even though a picture book is fiction, it is based on facts...so we were to look at the things from the picture book to create our prior knowledge...what we already know about penguins. And then we wrote. Wow...they did a marvelous job! We have been working on penguin art as well..you will see it very very soon!!

On Thursday we began our new library unit with Mrs. Whitelaw. We will be learning about Barbara Reid, a Canadian author and illustrator. Whenever we begin a study of an author we learn all about her or him. I told them some stories about her as a child, her likes and dislikes. About her pets and her favourite colour. By the time the unit is done, the children should have an intimate knowledge of Barbara Reid and her style of writing and her special style of pictures....ask your child about her pictures. By the way Thursdays will be our new library book exchange time as well!

Our time with Mrs. Montagano is back. She came in on Friday to talk about this months virtue. This months virtue is self discipline. They talked about self-discipline and then wrote a little bit about it. Mrs. Montagano was very pleased with everyone's listening skills and their writing skills!!

Finally I would like to once again welcome Marawan and his family to Bayview. They are from Egypt! Lets give him and his family a big Bayview welcome!!

With that, I just want to add, that I will not be in school tomorrow, I think the flu has hit me and I have taken to the couch all day...ugg...Ms. Bailey will be in for me tomorrow, so that is wonderful! Please go over this with your child...appropriate behaviour with a guest teacher.

Thank you
and take care.
teri