Monday Memo
September 19, 2011
Dear Parents,
I hope everyone had a great weekend! What a week we had last week with one day being really hot and a few days later, really cold. Only in Iowa… It was great seeing so many of you at our Literacy Night last Thursday! I think it is a great way to get together as a community and to support reading for leisure! The Book Fair is always a nice thing to add as a possible way to get some more books into the kid’s hands! Mrs. Burt was awesome as always, with her interactive books for the kids!!
Mrs. Staley will be taking over reading this week, along with math. For reading this week, she will be working on our review week. It is a review week for grammar, reviewing kinds of sentences, common nouns and subjects and predicates. With spelling, we have a list of review words that are attached to this memo. During whole group reading, she will b working on compare/contrast, syllabication, and abc order. They students will be reading two shorter stories this week entitled: Parcel Post Kid and Chester Cricket’s Pigeon. Our centers this week will include: Successmaker, Poem center, Vocabulary Center, Typing Tutor, and our language “bucket”. Add that to our guided reading groups, and it will again be a busy week in reading!
Mrs. Staley will also be working on math this week. She will be working on using decimals in numbers and again, numbering numbers from least to greatest. Last week the students worked on counting money and counting back change. That is a tough skill, but so important. The students will constantly be working on that concept by playing “store” as one of our Math Menu games. This week she will also be having them do a review and if they are ready, she hopes to give them their chapter test on Friday. If they aren’t we will do it next week.
We will be starting our new unit in Science entitled “Animal Growth and Adaptations”. It is such a neat unit. We are also working on our daily oral science. Our focus this week is on our teeth. For Social Studies, we will be reviewing the vocabulary we went over throughout the handbook. We will also be working on our daily oral geography lessons. This week it is over using a map grid. We will be starting on the regions of the United States next week. The next Monday Memo will let you know what region we are starting with and the students may bring items to share from that region, if they have been there on vacation… Our share day is every Monday. The students are free to share something they want to share with the class, whether that is an item or just verbally share with us.
Starting the next memo, Mrs. Staley will be taking over the writing of it. She will also be taking over the entire class for the next 3 weeks.
As always, please feel free to let me know of any questions or concerns you may have!
Sincerely,
Chris Mallen
Phone: 444-3093 (Home) 444-4300 ext. 336
Email: chris.mallen@belmond-klemme.k12.ia.us
