Newsletter October 23 - October 26

I hope that you all had a nice three-day weekend!  I got to have lunch with my sisters in Salt Lake so it was marvelous for me!

Here are this week's happenings:

• Our PTA Eagle Spirit Run is still fundraising until October 30.  You still have time to register your child online for a free pedometer before that date.  We raised over our school goal of $12,000 (which is phenomenal)!  The school will celebrate by having a glow in the dark dance party.  I will let you know the date of that dance party when details are given to me.
• I sent home Lexia notes with usernames and passwords.  But, now those have been changed again because of the district syncing to a system called "clever badges".  We don't have cameras on all of our computers in the lab and can't use clever badges in there.  Long story short is since they've synced to using Clever Badges there cannot be any duplicate usernames and since we use first names there could be duplicates.  I will send home new letters by Thursday or Friday with the new login information.
• On Halloween, remember that you child can come dressed up in their Halloween costumes.  Please no masks, gore, or weapons.  The parade will be from 10:45-11:00.  You are welcome to come! Halloween in First grade is pretty magical!
• Tomorrow the first grade team will have it's first Math Intervention Wednesday.  We will separate the students into four groups based on need and reteach or enrich on the concept of counting on.  This will be a weekly occurrence from 10:30-11:00 on Wednesday (Halloween is an exception).  These groups will be fluid based on weekly assessments.  We are excited about how this will help our kids.
• In reading, we are finishing up our second unit.  This unit really concentrated on the "silent e" rule for long vowels.  We also learned about proper nouns and quotation marks and we've been reading about Gran and her adventures with Josh and Jen.  We've slowed down just a bit with our study of Mesopotamia as we have been working more on writing complete sentences and writing in our journals. We will continue this study or Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt over the next few weeks.
• In math as I stated earlier we are especially concentrating on the counting on strategy in addition.  We will continue learning other strategies that will help students with addition facts.  After we complete this chapter we will start doing timed addition fact quizzes.  Think "old school" 2 minute timed quizzes on all of the math facts (+0, +1, +2 etc.).  

I think that's it for this week.  Have a nice Tuesday!

Happy Reading!

Mrs. Armstrong