December 1, 2017

Dear Families,

With the weather becoming colder and coats, boots, mittens, gloves, scarves and hats being worn to school, please remember to label all of your child's items, snow pants and boots especially. 

Important dates: 

Monday, November 27th-29th  Vision Screening for 1st and 3rd Graders

Wednesday, December 13th Holiday Shop @ 4:30 - 8:00 pm

Thursday, December 21st Grade Level Holiday Parties-a sign up genius will be sent home soon if you would like to help at the party

Friday, December 22nd Last Day of School Before Winter Break

Monday, January 8th School Resumes

Here are some highlights from our learning:

Reading- We are continuing the amazing reading strategy, "BHH".  This strategy is an amazing tool to help students become not just incredible readers, but to actively think about the text and about their own thinking.  We hope that while your child is reading with you at home, you can have conversations with your child about: 1.Book: retelling or summarizing what is in the book (somebody,  wanted, but, so, then),  2.Head: what surprised me? What was a powerful statement? What am I wondering about? What questions do I have? and 3. What life lessons did I learn? What did I learn about me? How will this help me to be better?
How do I feel after reading this text? 

Writing – The students are very excited....next week we will learn about Blogging! Next week, we will learn what blogging is, who blogs, and why bloggers blog. We'll learn about Digital citizenship and  look at sample blogs.  We'll  begin to  write a paper blog and learn about commenting and how to write appropriate comments.  Please don't  go onto Kidblog yet, as they haven't been taught how to sign in or our classroom blogging expectations.

Math – We took our unit 3 math test.  Please look for the cover sheet that went home today. We also took our pretest for unit 4.  The homelinks, at home review, and IXL skills will be  sent home soon. We started learning about time with lesson 4.1.  Next week, we will complete lessons 4.2-4.5. We highly suggest you do the homelinks, practice IXL, and find some fun apps to start working on telling time at home.  

                                            

Social studies- We continued working on our welcome packets for new students who come to Deerfield. We will most likely finish them up next week. Thank you to all who participated in the Flat Stanley Project! Flat Stanley traveled all over the world and we were able to learn about many new places and interesting languages!  Some of the places we received letters and pictures from were Texas, Wisconsin, Washington D.C, India, Japan and Korea! It's so impressive to hear seven and eight year olds read and speak in their native language!

Mindfulness- Ms. Carol taught us about how being mindful helps us create space to control our emotions. She read some great books that shared information about responding or reacting.  We also talked about what you can do if you have a strong emotion (where to go, what to do). Ask your child to show you how mindfulness can help anyone in a stressful situation! 
                                                

   

Reminder:
Please send 2 healthy snacks only! No candy, chocolate bars, cupcakes, or sugary items or hot fries/Doritos! They are welcome to eat those items at their lunch time but not in our classroom. Children will be asked to put those items away. Thanks for your cooperation:)

Have a great weekend!