Monday Memo
August 29, 2011
Dear Parents,
I hope everyone had a great weekend!! We made it through our first week of school! Everyone is starting to do better with remembering to listen when I talk, focusing, using your time… I appreciate that you are making sure the kids finish their homework, if they have any. Reading every night for 15 minutes is also something I am so appreciative of you making sure your child does. Thanks for referring to my first memo for any questions you may have about the classroom…
This week in reading we are reading about a man who lived part of his life in Japan and part in the United States and how he felt that home was in both places. The story is called Grandfather’s Journey. We will be working on a variety of skills with this story, this week. Comprehension, vocabulary, word webbing, and writing a haiku poem are a few of the skills we will work on this week. We will also be working on subjects and predicates as well as reviewing the kinds of sentences, which we worked on last week, during our grammar skills time. Our spelling words this week have the long 0 and i vowel sound and the short o and I vowel sound. The words are attached to this list. For centers, we will be doing a vocabulary story, with words from our story, keyboarding with our Fusion Computers, doing a review activity that we call our language bucket, working on comprehending with poems, and doing Successmaker in the computer lab. We are busy during reading!!
For Math, we are working on place value and the value of numbers. This week we are working on problem solving with those concepts. We also do a daily review sheet, we do what we call a math bucket, and we do our math lesson and spiral review. It seems like a lot but they have a lot of time allotted to working on their math, and if they use the time wisely, there is plenty of time to play some math menu games. We have learned Ten Toss so far this year.
We had fun doing a classification game on the promethean board and we also did a game where we identified the location of the 7 continents. We are also doing daily oral geography and daily oral science. We are starting our science and social studies class with these problem solving activities. It is a fun way to get started. Right now we are talking about bacteria and decomposers with our daily oral science. It is kind of gross, but interesting. For Social Studies, we are working on our handbook in our textbook that review the use of globes, maps, … We also have some fun promethean board activities that relate to our topic of the day. We do a variety of activities each day with Science and Social Studies. We read, write, do hands-on and we try to finish with some type of game on the pb.
Keep having the students read a chapter of Tales of A Fourth Grade Nothing each night. We will have be testing over that story at the end of the week. I will then give the students their own book from the realistic fiction genre to read independently and test over. Thanks for signing the planner each night that the students have read for at least 15 minutes!
As always, any questions or concerns, please feel free to call or email me!
Sincerely,
Chris Mallen
Phone: Home: 444-3093 School: 444-4300 ext. 336
Email: chris.mallen@belmond-klemme.k12.ia.us
