Monday Memo
February 14, 2011
Dear Parents,
I hope everyone had a great weekend! Last week was filled with a variety of activities. We were so fortunate to have Linda Flaherty from the Blanden Museum in Fort Dodge, come and visit with us this year. She tours North Iowa schools and centers on the fourth graders. She presents them with a presentation of a famous artist and the kids receive a book from the museum. This year she talked about a special glass blowing artist. She had the kids create a stain glass window art activity and they really enjoyed it. She showed them a video of glass blowing and it was so interesting to see how little pellets of glass become beautiful pieces of work. That was a lot of fun. We are displaying their stain glass windows right now, but will send them home in the near future. We also got to go to the Belmond Care Center. We always enjoy our trip there and got to play Valentine Bingo with our new friends. They are so nice to us over there and it is always a delight! With two days of no school the week before, we spent last week kind of playing “catch-up”. We finished our social studies test over the Western Region. We finished our Rocks and Minerals unit. We started our Chapter 6 in Math over 2DX2D.
In Reading this week, we are finishing up on our “Problem Solvers” unit. This week the focus is on Poetry. We will be reading a variety of poems. We will be reading a book of poems. We will be writing some different kinds of poems such as lyrical, haiku and acrostic poems. We will also finish our biographies this week. We will learning about some famous poets during our guided reading time. Centers will have us working on vocabulary skills, our typing skills, and doing Successmaker. Next week we will be starting our “Heroes” unit and I will talk more about that next week. The spelling list for this week is attached to this memo. Using exact adjectives is our lesson this week in grammar.
For Math, as I said above, we started our Chapter 6 last week. This chapter involves multiplication but now we are working with multiplying 2DX2D. We will be working with problem solving as well this week. Multiplying money will also be worked on with the bigger numbers this week. We will continue with our “buckets” which have the constant review of math concepts as well this week. Hopefully we will be able to find a little time for some math games this week.
We are starting on the Southeastern Region of the United States in our Social Studies. We thought it was a nice fit with our “Heroes” unit we will start on next week in Reading as many of our heroes are African American and came from that region of the US. Many of the people we read our biographies about came from that region of the United States as well. For Science, we are moving on talking about weather.
Keep having the students read each night for 20 minutes. The students tied with Mrs. Jenison’s class so the poster got to stay with both of our classes. This month we are using the points they gain when they take an RC book test. Those points will be added up for the month of February and used to decide a winner between our classes.
Thanks to our room mothers for the Valentine’s party they put on for us today!! The room mothers were: Soccoro Martinez, Anne Nelson, Dawn Sander, and Megan Kuhlers. We truly appreciate their time and effort in putting on a great party for us!!
As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email or give me a call!!
Sincerely,
Chris Mallen
Phone: (Home) 444-3093 (School) 444-4300 ext. 336
Email: chris.mallen@belmond-klemme.k12.ia.us
