Week of August 27th

Dear Parents,                 REMINDER THAT THE FOLLOWING MONDAY IS LABOR DAY, SEPT. 3RD, AND THERE IS NO SCHOOL THAT DAY!  ENJOY YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS!                          

WOW!!!!  We have had a great 2 weeks in school!!!  I hope that the heat /temperature will improve in the coming weeks so that we can stay out longer at recess than 5 - 10 minutes.  They all need a chance to run around and play outside.  Also, thanks to each of you that attended Open House on Tuesday! 

FYI - We got a new student on Thursday--her name is Hana Sherrod.  We now have 15 students in our classroom.  We have had PERFECT ATTENDANCE for 10 days straight in school!!  We earned our Greyhound dog for the hall.  Keep up the good work on attendance!  Show and Tell will be weekly on Tuesdays.  Specials for this Friday, August 31st will be an "A" day-PE as it is the 5th Friday of the month.  Then, you will start over with an ABCD pattern for September.  On Friday, September 7th, there will be dinner and movie night starting at 6:30 at Garrison Mill.  More information in your PAWS.

Junie B. Jones - how much fun we had reading Nancy Park's book, Junie B. Jones, First Grader (at Last!).   We made a booklet with a cover for our 5 reading prompts we gave the students as we read all chapters of the book.  Mrs. Whitson and I took turns reading to our classes and reviewing daily what had already taken place.  This is a good skill to use at home with your nightly reading--have your child retell what he/she read or has had read to them. Those booklets were sent home Friday in their folders.  We are assessing our two classes with the DRA to make our reading groups. We had a great culminating activity on Friday where we worked in 7 cooperative groups to trace either a girl or boy on a big piece of paper.  Then, they were to color their character (Mr. Scary, Junie B., May, Herb, etc.) as to the characteristics that we had listed on the board.  We will finish those on Monday.

Math - As you can tell from the student's class work/homework, we are working on addition sentences and using the vocabulary that goes along with them----plus, is equal to, sum, and addition sentence.  We just talked about the property of zero on Friday and how it is used.....we have a new "Math Jingle" to sing about zero.  I hope to get some practice sheets on numbers 1 -10 to work on reversals for some of the students.  Please have your child correct reversals on his/her homework.  Chapter 2 will begin after Labor Day and it will be on subtraction.

Writing - We have been practicing all the lowercase letters of the alphabet so that your child can start to correct the wrong ways the letters are being made.  For example, a lowercase "o" is a top start letter made going to the left side and down---many of the students start at the bottom of an "o" and make a circle.  We will continue to practice the remainder of the alphabet and then begin to concentrate on individual letters one at a time.

Phonics - We do Open Court daily that gives your child patterns to follow in sounds that they hear in spelling a word.  What I am looking for now in their writing is to put on paper the sounds that they hear in a word, not necessarily spelling it correctly.  We also go over the "Practice Tricks" several times a week that they had in kindergarten such as "er" says er as in flower, "sh" says sh as in ship, etc.   These are excellent in helping them spell words.  Mentioning spelling---spelling words and their Friday test will begin the week of September 4th.

Daily Oral Language - (DOL) is used to help in making corrections in a sentence that I write on the board.  It teaches them editing marks that are used in the upper grades, reminds them that every sentence must begin with a capital letter and have some sort of punctuation mark at the end of it, and uses of commas as in a series or a date.

New Things for next week - Starting on  Monday, August 27th, we will have our first library time where each child may check out a book (we will go every other week to the library, but your child may bring in their book, turn it in, and check out another book anytime during that two weeks); on Tuesday, August 28th, we will have Computer Lab weekly from 8:10 - 8:50am; and on Thursday, August 30th, at 6:30 there will be an Ice Cream Social for all new Kindergartners and First Graders new to Garrison Mill.

Hope you have a good week and the weather is better to all of us!

Sincerely,

Peggy Snook