I hope you had a great long weekend!  It's a short week so there will be only 'no excuse' words (words that they should always spell correctly using the word wall or their personal dictionary) for spelling. 

Thank you for all the contributions to our Stone Soup last week.  The kids enjoyed making it and most thought it tasted pretty good.  And thank to the parents who joined us in downtown Lethbridge for our treasure hunt while learning about the history of Galt Gardens and the surrounding buildings - Mrs. McAulay, Mrs. Toles, Mr. Oshima and Mrs. Brunelle.

We are getting close to finishing up with our Small Crawling and Flying Animals unit in science.  The kids have really enjoyed learning about those little creatures.  They have each created a writing project based on the book "Diary of a Worm/Spider/Fly" and replaced the animal with their own choice.  They have worked so hard on these little books.  I can't wait for them to share.

In math we have been working on number concepts such as odd/even, ordinals, estimating, number representation and skip counting.  The latter took a lot of our focus and it could still be reinforced at home.  In grade one they learned skip counting from zero by 2s, 5s and 10s.  In grade two we are building on that skill by asking them to start at any number and skip count from there.  For example, count by 5s starting at 65 and ending at 100.  Or count by 10s starting at 7.  Feel free to give your child oral questions such as those to help them gain strength with this skill.  We have moved on to making numbers using rods (10s) and cubes (1s). 

Our Feed The Bug program has started and we are in search of some non-perishable food item donations.  There is a friendly competition between each class to see which one can collect the most items.  Anything you can contribute would be great appreciated.

Some important dates:

Now - Oct. 22 :  Feed the Bug program
Oct. 21 : Hot Lunch
               Retakes
Oct. 22 : Feed the Bug assembly
Oct. 28 : Galt Museum field trip
Oct. 29 : Chocolate Day!
Oct. 31 : Halloween - students may wear their costumes for the day (no weapons)

A housekeeping note:  If your child has shoes at school that have laces and require tying, please help them learn to tie them if they don't know already.  There are a lot of long laces trailing behind some students that are unsafe and it's a skill that should be practiced regularly at this age.