November 2009

Welcome to our new student in the TTh class, Connor! Joan, Jackie and I have been thoroughly enjoying your children – we have some great friendships developing! Check out some of the interesting things we’ve been doing on the bulletin board at the bottom of the stairs. Remember, as we go through the next weeks and month the weather will continue to be unpredictable. Please be prepared for all weather conditions – we LOVE going outside!

We’ll be setting aside time for mini-conferences on November 17th, 18th, and 19th at the end of the school day – look for the sign up at the bottom of the stairs. This is a chance to touch base about how things are going, ask questions or talk about any concerns you might have. We’ll schedule formal conferences in spring when we have longer to discuss each child. We’re always happy to meet with parents anytime at your request.

Friend of the week is starting! Each week we will choose one child from each class to bring in 6-8 photos to share and talk about during circle time. Watch for your child’s name to appear on the calendar – we go alphabetically by last name.

It’s been great to have so many parents at our parent meetings! We had some fun ideas for community service projects that we hope to work on with the children. The next parent meeting is Monday, November 16th at 6:30 pm. This will probably be our last meeting until after the holidays and we’ll be looking to schedule a discussion about discipline for an upcoming meeting.

There will be no school on November 11th for Veteran’s Day, the 20th for school planning, and 25th-27th for Thanksgiving break. On November 18th, students from the Ewing Speech Clinic at Ithaca College will be at TCNS to do speech and language screenings. The Ewing Clinic can only come to the MWF class, so if your child is TTh and you’d like the screening, please let me know.

Fundraising: Thanks so much to everyone who helped sell bulbs! We raised $730 for TCNS which is a great help to our program! And we got $21.75 from bottle returns last month! Shopping Day is coming up – Saturday, November 7th. We will have a number of direct sales vendors on hand to demonstrate their products. It’s a great chance to get some early holiday shopping done! We’re also planning a bake sale and asking families to consider baking something for the sale – look for the sign-up! We only have about 6 weeks left before Fun with Santa! It’s time to start collecting those silent auction donations! Look for info in your cubby and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask! You’ll be hearing a lot more about Fun with Santa during the upcoming month!

November Activities: With Thanksgiving coming up, we’ll be talking about family and what it means to be thankful. We’ll begin the month by reading Owl Babies by Martin Waddell. This is a wonderful story about an owl family and we’ll be making paper bag puppets, pinecone owls, and a nocturnal collage. Our next book will be a wonderful story about family by Rosemary Wells, Noisy Nora. We’ll work on our own family portrait and build a mouse. The week before Thanksgiving we’ll read Thanksgiving Treat by Catherine Stock. We’ll make all the traditional holiday crafts – handprint turkeys, paper bag turkeys, and bake pumpkin pie! You’ll have plenty of holiday centerpieces to share!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!