Mallen's Monday Memo October 29, 2012

Monday Memo,

October 29, 2012

Dear Parents,

                I hope everyone had a nice, long weekend! It was a pleasure visiting with you at conferences. I want to let you know that our fall party is on Oct. 31^st with the parade at 2:00.

                We will begin a story entitled “Boss of the Plains” this week. This story is our third story in the “American Stories” unit. We will be doing vocabulary, and comprehension skills over this story and we will be working on writing a business letter. Our grammar lessons this week are working on more plural nouns. Our spelling words this week have some controlled r sounds and are attached to this memo. Our guided reading stories are stories about the Plains. Our centers this week will have us working on reading a vocabulary story and answering some comprehension questions over this story, correcting a misspelled paragraph and writing it correctly, and working on setting up a business letter appropriately. Just a reminder for the students to keep reading their “Bound for Oregon” chapter each night. The library was closed last week due to the Book Fair, so we will get there tomorrow to get another RC book to read once that chapter is finished.

                In Math,we will be working on problem solving applications, our diagnostic review of the chapter, our book chapter test and our “official” chapter test. On Friday, we will be playing a mental math game called “Randy Raccoon” and we will play some math games.

                As I spoke at conferences, we will be starting the DOGS (Daily Oral Geography) today. Just a reminder that they have to be handed in by Friday, have their names on it, and have all of the questions correct, to be in our weekly drawing. They may use any resources they have to answer the geography questions. Their social studies book is a huge reference. The back of the book has a lot of maps they will need.

                As always, please feel free to call or email me with any questions/concerns.

Have a great week!

Chris Mallen

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

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

Mallen's Monday Memo October 8, 2012

Monday Memo

October 8, 2012

I hope everyone had a great weekend! We enjoyed our Iowa’s Healthiest State walk on Wednesday. It was a beautiful day! We had an assembly right after that to talk about assembly etiquette. Today we are having a pep assembly to celebrate Homecoming week. The 7-12^th graders came over to make it a school wide assembly. I have attached the dress-up things we have going this week at Jacobson for Homecoming week.

This week in reading we will be starting our new theme, Adventure Stories.  Our first story is Tomas and the Library Lady.  Your child is reading an Encyclopedia Brown book and they will need to be finished and tested on it by October 18^th. In our small reading groups we each will be reading American Short stories that I believe your child will enjoy.  This week we will be working on a grammar bucket, comprehension, dictionary skills and short stories. We are going to work on proper nouns, synonyms, antonyms and homophones in Language Arts. Last week we focused on the genre of mystery stories and we read an Encyclopedia Brown book as a class. We did a number of activities over the story, throughout our RTI time.

For math this week will be working on solving equations, number expressions, 3 ways of computation, and patterns. They will continue working on multiplication sheets and their bucket for review. We will also do some review of our 3 column addition and subtraction problems.  Please work with your child with the multiplication facts.  This will help them greatly if they have these memorized.

In Science we are continuing with animal adaptations and behaviors. We will be testing over this unit on Friday. Look for the study guide to come home with the students Thursday night.

Social Studies will be working on the Southwestern Region. I hope to send a study guide home with your child Tuesday night, with the test on Wednesday.

I sent a note home to the parents who agreed to help plan our parties this year. If you did not receive one, and had expressed an interest in planning one, let me know and I will send a note home with your child. Thank-you again for your time and effort!!

Have a great week!

Sincerely,

Chris Mallen