Make sure you view the NEW SLIDE SHOW under this post!!

We're entering our last week of school for the year 2007. Best wishes for a great winter break and please have your student's stay involved with learning during this time.

Whether in the kitchen cooking, setting the table, helping with the dishes, or completing some of the work on the homework links, set aside time for them to learn, write, read and do.

I will be sending home appropriately leveled books for their reading pleasure and they still need to be 'listened' to, 'read' to and write, draw and tell about what they've read. Listening for fluency and phrasing is a helpful activity and re-reading the next day to show how they can fix-up the tricky parts is also VERY important.

Thank you for a great year and I am looking forward to seeing all the students back in January.

By the way, Happy New Year, when it arrives! I'll be off in Maryland visiting our new grandson!

Mrs. Petty

Check out my Slide Show!

Check out my Slide Show!

CHECK FOR NEW HOMEWORKS LINKS !!!

Well, we did it. We decorated our Graham Cracker Houses and boy do they look wintery and beautiful. Of course, they all wanted to take them home the same day, but..... we haven't written a rough draft, edited it ourselves and with a peer, and of course, had Mrs. Petty done the final run-through to publish. We hope to complete this task within the next three days, so look for your child's house to additionally adorn your table and/or a holiday decoration spot around the house. Thanks, once again, to the Matallana girls' and baby brother for bagging all the trimmings, ... it just worked out so well. BTW, I am discouraging any munching of the house and its outer-limits. You can look, but please don't eat after they're sent home.

We also completed 24 holiday cards with personal letters to 24 different schools around the United States. We look forward to receiving 24 different ones from friends in the U.S. We'll also find the location of their school on Google Earth. What a way to see and virtually 'travel' to another place in the U.S. from here in Italy. I'm learning right along with all the students.

This week we'll also be working on our Family Holiday Gift and hope to wrap and send them home next week. It's a labor of love and a little keepsake for years to come. Hope you like them, when they're finished. :-)

We're comparing two different versions of the Gingerbread Man/Boy stories this week, also. Out first version was a Phonics Reader version of the Pancake Man. This will be sent home on Monday evening, so listen for great phrasing and fluency. It should be a familiar read by now, so enjoy and encourage expression during reading.

Our math addition and subtraction fact families are coming right along. Teaching and working on strategies seems to help with mental computation, so encourage the thinking part when mentally computing. We are also very good at quickly duplicating a model of 10s and 1s using manipulatives with numbers from 1-100. This helps in being able to visualize regrouping with double digit addition. We'll save double-digit subtraction for much later in the year, until they are confident and flexible with their addition.



If you have a family photo(s), please send in. We've got a few together-families, and other collage-family featuring individuals within the family. We'd love to have everyone's picture(s) up to display. You are still welcome to get your students registered to use the Dodds.net secure e-mail at school, to encourage learing about the web-e-mail system. We've got 5 of our students up and running. Send in a note, and I'm happy to send the forms necessary to get them on before Winter Break.

Mrs. Petty

Check out the December Posts and the new slide show!! See below:-)

Check out my Slide Show!

The month of December has arrived and your child began the month by creating a countdown to Christmas on Friday. Hopefully they're keeping up with the fun and strengthening their counting backwards thinking. We have been working on missing addends in math and, as you know it helps them to understand the operation of subtraction in and addition problem. The inverse thinking also shows the relationship between fact families such as 3,4 and 7. So...... 4+3=7, 3+4=7; 7-3=4, 7-4=3; 3+_-7 & _+4=7. We're working on flexibility and the comprehension part of recognizing whether to add or subtract on each problem to be solved.

This skill also transfers to multiplication (repeated addition) and division as they take on more ability to recognize other operations.



I have discovered a new on-line math opportunity that is free. You can register as a parent for your child and then have the opportunity to have extra practice on numerous skills throughout the basic math curriculum that meets them where they are, scores their progress and continues to challenge them all at the same time. Please refer to this web-address and proceed with registration, at which time you will be given a confirmation password to use each time your child logs in to the site. I highly recommend this, as it is paperless, keeps the data as to where your child is progressing and moves them through the 'next steps'. Register for Brainish here: http://www.brainish.com/Registration/tabid/53/Default.aspx Good luck and of course, you can have your child participate if you choose to :-).



We are participating in a worldwide Holiday Card Exchange for the next three weeks. We will be receiving 24 holiday cards from different schools all over the United States. We took pictures for the cards on Friday, and hope to be creating, finalizing and sending our cards to their destinations on Wednesday. It should be exciting to receive these and each time we do, we'll virtually 'visit' the school from where it was sent through using Google Earth on the SMARTboard. How exciting, so you'll be hearing about this throughout the next three weeks. If you have a family member deployed, please encourage them to send a card to the class as well. Our small bulletin board will hold the evidence of all the cards received and the more we get, the more we'll post. Thanks for letting your kids hear from their deployed parent through this holiday card project.



We will be preparing another Reader's Theatre for the month of December and they're very excited about it, once again. I was so pleased with their efforts on the Thanksgiving Reader's Theatre performance. We travelled to all the other first grade classrooms, and Mrs. Avermann's speech classroom to perform and practice our presentation skills. Many students had their parts memorized. They never cease to amaze me in what they're able to do.



We'll be decorating our gingerbread (graham cracker) houses this week. They always turn out so adorable, so we'll wait to see how their writing project turns out. We will be working on organizing our writing, before writing this month, which includes sequencing, main idea, and supporting details, with a closing statement. Written language is closely associated with spoken language and experiences provided to them to produce interesting samples. Their handwriting, spelling, mechanics and grammar are improving in their authentic writing. We will be editing and publishing these outside our classroom. It should be fun and worthwhile.



Once again, thank you so much for your continued support and work with your child.
Enjoy the new slide show posted below!

Happy December,

Mrs. Petty