Monday Memo
April 11, 2011
Dear Parents,
I hope everyone enjoyed the lovely weekend! We are finished with our ITBS tests for this week. The results will be sent home with your child’s final report card. Last week went by very quickly! We are enjoying our correspondence via Skype and Google Live Chat, with Kelley Wilhelm. He is working on his PHD from the University of Wisconsin and is currently doing the first of part of a 3 part tour of Antarctica. Part of his project involves connecting with a classroom. We get to be the classroom. He called us from Antarctica on Thursday. We were able to ask him questions and he showed us what it looks like outside his station. His goal is to get students interested in science. He will be there for two more weeks. Next year he will be there for two months and then he has another stint for two months. He will keep in touch with our class throughout those visits and we hope he will be available to talk to the entire Jacobson Elementary. There will be an article in the Blueprint section of the Belmond Independent , in the near future. Kelley did such a great job with the kids!! Speaking of the Belmond Independent, Dirk Vanderlinden will be coming to talk to us on Thursday. Every year the fourth graders get to draw an ad for local businesses. It is a great activity for them in so many ways. He will be talking to them about ads and we will write the ads the following week. The hope is to get them in the paper by the end of April.
This week we are beginning a new unit in reading. It is entitled “Friend or Foe”. We will be reading some non- fiction books as our genre this unit. Our first story is entitled “Salmon Summer”. With this story we will be working on comprehension, vocabulary, adverbs, direction following and multiple meaning words. We will be doing a few things with sequencing as well. We began a book last week, entitled Freedom Train. This is the book from which the play we saw in Des Moines, was based on. We have been working on retellings throughout this book. We will continue to do that this week as well. The students all have RC books to read and should be reading those at home for their 20 minutes a night. It was exciting to learn that we won the reading poster again for the month of March. I appreciate all the help you give me towards getting those kids to read each night!!
In Math, we are starting our unit on Geometry. Today we tested over the division unit. This was a tough unit but they did very well. Again, knowing those facts is incredibly important and they do know them!! We are going to be testing over the SE region of the United States on Wednesday. Look for a study guide to come home Tuesday night. We will be starting on the NE region of the US next week. We are starting a unit on planets in science this week as well. That is always a favorite of the kids! This week we will talk about the objects in the solar system and we will discuss a little about each planet.
The spelling list this week is on 3 syllable words and it is attached to this memo. I sent home book orders last Thursday. Let’s have those orders due on the 20th of April.
As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to email or call me! Have a great week!
Sincerely,
Chris Mallen
Phone: Home: 444-3093 School: 444-4300 ext. 336
Email: chris.mallen@belmond-klemme.k12.ia.us
