22-28 November 2009
ATTENTION: PLEASE SEND IN YOUR NOVEMBER BOXTOPS FOR EDUCATION ANYTIME FOR THE NOVEMBER COUNT. THANK YOU!
Have I said thanks for all the efforts on the Family Project ABC BOOK? If not, accept this great big THANK YOU! What a pleasure its been to hear your child read their book and share with their friends. We've laughed 'and oo-oo-oo-ed' and 'aw-aw-aw-aw-ed" at them! We have four more to enjoy. Thank you so much. These made us so happy!
NO SPELLING THIS WEEK!
Thank you so much for your responses to the Thanksgiving Sing-A-Long and lunch in the AAFES Cafeteria this coming Tuesday.
PLEASE STOP BY THE ROOM AND PICK-UP YOUR LUNCH MONEY BEFORE GOING TO THE GYM!
Remember to enter the gym at 10:40 (Ms. P will be teaching up to that time), and after the sing-a-long, we'll move directly to the cafeteria @ 11:00 for our Turkey dinner and trimmings. Many thanks to Gabe, the cafeteria manager, for making this possible for us. Thanks to the 2nd grade for changing their lunch time with us, also! Teamwork is such an important part of working in a school.
This is another short week and I'll load up your child's reading bag for use at home to read over the long Thanksgiving week-end. Make certain you review your prompts for supporting the solving of unknown words throughout their books. We're working on addition to 10, but 'shaking' 2 color-sided plastic beans to discover all the many combinations, or fact families for each sum. Here's an example of the '7' facts:
1+6=7 6+1=7
2+5=7 5+2=7
3+4=7 4+3=7
0+7=7 7+0=7
The students are becoming quite proficient at this and the goal is to make them see, know and mentally compute quickly the different sums; then apply them to word problems in the context of addition and subtraction. Please check out this link on fact families, where it shows how addition and subtraction are reciprocal operations.
I am in need of classroom volunteers on the morning of Thursday, 3 December from 9-11 a.m. We will be making graham cracker houses and candy trains that morning. The more parents I have, the easier it becomes. We will use this activity as a springboard to write instructions on how we made our houses and trains.If anyone cares to bag the candy for this project, I'll bring it to school and you can take it home to organize it all into zip-locs. We'll use the stories of the Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett and The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg.
Watch for a reading response journal in their reading bag in the month of December. Your child will begin writing about 'what they read' at home each night, whether it's on RAZ-kids, or a hard copy book sent home from our leveled reading library at school. Please encourage appropriate sentences, with correct capitalization & punctuation. I'll include instructions inside the front cover of the journal to clarify.
Best wishes for a safe and wonderful Thanksgiving break. I am so very thankful for supportive parents, a great school to work in, and my opportunity to teach your children. They are so sweet and precious. Keep up the work on the computer web-sites and reading at home.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
Mrs. Petty
