Mallen's Monday Memo October 1, 2012

Monday Memo

October 1, 2012

Dear Parents,

I hope everyone had a great weekend! This week has a couple of interesting events in store for us. On Wednesday at 9:00 our school will be participating in the Iowa Healthiest State initiative. We will be meeting at the front of our building and walking the trail. You are more than welcome to join us. There will be other community members walking with us. That afternoon at 1:00, the students will be listening to a 4H presentation. They will be invited to join their organization. Information will be given to them at the meeting. We also dismiss early on Wednesday, so it is definitely going to be an interesting day!

This  week  we will be continuing on finishing up with our Journeys theme. We will be reading about a child that actually gets mailed to a relative in “Parcel Post Kid” and we will be reading about an adventure a cricket has with a bird, in the story “Chester Cricket”. Both stories provide the characters with a unique adventure or “journey”. We will be writing journey stories too this week. We will also be working on the following skills:  Comprehension, vocabulary, comparing and contrasting stories. Our grammar skills this week will all be reviewing what we learned this past few weeks: Sentence Kind, subjects and predicates, common nouns, and using nouns in a series. Our spelling words are review words and are attached to this memo.

In Science we are continuing on animal adaptations and behaviors. This is a much shorter unit in Science, so we will already be working on the review this week. For Social Studies, we will be working on the Southwestern Region of the United States. This week the focus will be on working with latitutde and longitude and talking about the need for water and the availability of oil in the region.

In Math we will be starting our second chapter. I have the results of the first test in math in their folders for parent/teacher conferences. Our first lesson will be on using mental math when adding numbers. We will then use mental math when subtracting numbers. We will be estimating sums and differences this week. On Friday we will talk about over and under estimates for problem solving.

This week we are going to try to start using our typing agent which is located on our web site. If a student wants to try it at home, it is set up with their name and they can work on it at home. I will be showing them their password this week. Hopefully it will work okay. Sometimes there are a few glitches with the program, but we will see how it goes. Hopefully you can access it from home once we get going on it. It is an individualized program, so it will take them from where they left off.

As always, call with any questions/concerns!

Have a great week!

Sincerely,

Chris Mallen

Phone:  444-3093 (Home)   444-4300 ext. 336 (School)

Email:  chris.mallen@belmond-klemme.k12.ia.us