Newsletter January 7 - January 11

Today I sent home DIBELS scores for middle-of-the-year.  Please look over these and note the suggestions I made for helping at home.  The NUMBER ONE suggestion I made was to continue to have your child read their take home book 3 times every school night or be more diligent if you haven't been doing that nightly.  The New Year is a good time to set new goals if that hasn't been a consistent practice in your home.  I just barely finished and printed of the second quarter Power School grades.  Those print outs will be sent home tomorrow.  Please send back your child's homework folder DAILY so that important papers like the two I just mentioned do not get lost or unnoticed.

Here are this week's happenigs:

• Tomorrow, Tuesday, January 8 at 3:00 in the cafeteria we will be having our first grade awards.  I sent home e-mails to those students that will be receiving an award that day.  These are limited to attendance awards and Most Improved or Catch the Vision.  I haven't heard yet if we will be awarding certificates for our Lexia computer program.  If I hear tonight that we will be doing that I will send a group e-mail to those students who will be receiving a Lexia award.
• The notes I sent home today about awards are NOT for tomorrow--those notes are for the PTA reading awards that will be this Thursday at 2:45 in our classroom.  You are welcome to attend either one of these awards ceremonies. 
• Look for a note and a small "homework" project for our 100th day of school by Wednesday.  The 100th day of school is Thursday, January 17th!
• I have maybe half of the December reading calendars turned in.  Those were due on January 2.  Please turn those in.  January reading calendars were sent home last week.
• Today we started a new Listening and Learning unit on Astronomy.  Today we talked about the earth's atmosphere and outer space and the difference between those.  We learned that the sun is a star and is a giant ball of hot gas that is a million times larger than the earth and that it would take 3 months on the fastest rocket ship to make it to the sun.  In the next few days we will continue to learn more about the sun and the earth as well as stars, and the moon. 
• New spelling words will come home tomorrow.  These words all have the "past tense" marker (ed) that we have been learning about as verbs change form from present to past tense.  We have learned that 'ed' can make three different sounds, /ed/, /d/, and /t/, but it is always spelled 'ed'.  That might help as you help your child study these words.  We are continuing to learn about different kinds of animals in the Green Fern Zoo.  We will use this knowledge to start writing informational paragraphs. We have learned how to write complete sentences and now we will use that knowledge to start to formulate paragraphs.  We will especially in the next few weeks learn about Groundhogs since we just read about them today and Groundhogs day is in early February.  Our first informational paragraph will be about Groundhogs. We will also write about Martin Luther King and other animals from our book The Green Fern Zoo.

If you have any questions about your child's DIBELS scores or their second quarter grades please feel free to contact me.  Please also look at your child's behavior chart on Friday and ask them how they did in school (what color they were on at the end of the day). 

Happy Reading!

Mrs. Armstrong