Thankful Firsties and Learning Life Long Skills!

I hope you had a chance to check out Forest View´s Tree of Thanks this week if you stopped by! Our entire school took leaves and wrote what we are most thankful for and placed them on the tree. What an amazing display of thanks! This week was a lot of fun getting to learn about the first Thanksgiving, reading and discussing various books about the pilgrims and Native Americans and the first Thanksgiving. We also discussed what the pilgrims all had to be thankful for, which led into discussions about what we have to be thankful for too! I am thankful for the opportunity to work with this fun, spunky, silly, and smart group of firsties every day!

On Tuesday, we had our Firstie Feast! Our friends LOVED getting to dress up as pilgrims and Native Americans and enjoyed eating various traditional Thanksgiving foods.

I would like to send out a HUGE thank you to all of our families that helped make this feast a success. In addition to our parent volunteers, we had a lot of you help from home by sending in food for our feast. Without all of your help and support, none of this would have been possible. It is such a pleasure knowing we have your support from home!

While reading a story this week we saw some of the pilgrim children doing chores. This led to a discussion about chores that children do now. Our class shared some of the chores that they do at home as well. We heard from a lot of students that they help clean their rooms, make their beds, take care of the family pets, help sort laundry, put their clothes away, etc. We had a long discussion this week about what chores are and their importance. We also looked at how they are applied to our life at school as well.

Our friends have been struggling with picking up after themselves at school, not only in the coat area (as you can see it is very hard to keep track of our own things when they are laying all over the floor, mixed in with other people's things), but also at our work spaces as well. We had the discussion that if our things are not picked up things tend to get lost or broken. Not only are some of our friends having a hard time keeping track of boots, gloves and other snow gear, but we are also finding it hard to get right to work because our work stations are not picked up and are often missing pencils and other important tools. After seeing our coat area like this we had a long talk about the importance of picking up after ourselves and how it makes work time (and getting ready to go outside) much easier because we can get to work RIGHT AWAY! Watch this quick video below about childhood chores:

What are your thoughts? Having children perform age-appropriate chores at home helps them to learn daily living skills that will last them a lifetime and will carry over to other areas of their lives - not only at home!

On Wednesday, as we wrapped up our short week, we had an amazing display of thanks-GIVING with our annual Thanksgiving Food Drive. As a school we collected hundreds of non-perishable food items that we were able to donate to some very deserving Forest View families that needed an extra boost this Holiday Season. Mr. Brown led a fantastic assembly Wednesday morning while we brought in all of the food we had collected. We talked about many things that we have to be thankful for. What a wonderful way to help our kids show kindness towards others than to help others in need! It was truly moving to see our entire school work together to help our school families!

As we move into this coming week we will be working on some new and difficult skills. Our spelling and phonics focus each week has started to pick up and we will continue working on greater degrees of difficulty. It will be very important that your child practices at home in addition to the practice they receive at school. We will continue our focus on digraphs this week - these are tough skills to master, but remember practice makes progress!

As a reminder, please send ALL necessary snow gear with your child EVERY day! It is the season of unpredictable and cold weather. It can be kind of a pain sometimes having all of that snow gear hauled between school and home but it is very important! We are finding that some of our students are not bringing in hats and gloves every day, as well as snowpants and boots. Although I have a few extras to share with the class my ¨community snow gear wardrobe¨ is pretty small. I hate to see our kiddos go out without the necessary outside clothing on. If it is truly a hardship for your family to provide these items please contact me! I will make sure your child receives the gear they need. On a side note, if your children have outgrown their winter gear and you are thinking of donating it, we would gratefully take it to lend to our kiddos who forget theirs at home! You will also need to make sure to send a pair of inside shoes with your child (GYM shoes every Tuesday and Thursday) EVERY DAY. We want to make sure our kiddos are comfortable throughout the day - it is not fun wearing clunky snow boots all day. not to mention our group area gets wet from melting snow. Additionally, students loose points in gym class when they do not bring they gym shoes.

*Our final scholastic order before Christmas is coming up! Make sure to place your order before December 9th in order to have your books delivered before Christmas! Books make GREAT gifts - if they are a gift for your child and you do not want them sent home in their backpack let me know and we can get them to you another way!

Enjoy the remainder of you long holiday weekend! I hope that you were all able to spend quality time with your family and were able to share with others what you are most thankful for!