Monday Memo

 September 9, 2013

 

Dear Parents,

 

I hope everyone had a great weekend! Last week went very quickly. We weren’t here on Monday and I attended a meeting in Mason City on Thursday.

 

In reading this week, we are testing over Grandfather’s Journey. We took the spelling test today and we wrapped up our subject and predicate unit in grammar. We will be working on a story entitled Lost and Found which is about the Titanic. The kids always enjoy this story. We will be working on the skills: Comprehension, Vocabulary, Outlining, and Syllabication. Our grammar lessons this week are over compound sentences. We will also be spending some time gathering information on the Titanic. If the students would like to bring any information they find about it to school, that would be great! That could be through books, magazines, internet information…

 

This week in math we are working on understanding decimals with money, counting money and the most important part, we will be counting back change. This will be an ongoing skill as I feel it is so important that the students learn to count back change. I appreciate that if there is an opportunity at home to practice this skill, that you will. We are going to be adding more rows to our daily review. They are doing a good job with those wonderful reviews! It is such a good thing for the kids to do to prepare for the Iowa Assessments. It keeps all of those skills fresh in their memories. The daily times sheets are starting to work as well. We currently have two members of the “Never Again Club”. They join the “club” when they achieve 100% on their 100 point 5 minute timed test. There are a lot of the students that are knocking on the door to the club, and hopefully they will join on one of our Friday assessments.

 

We finished up on our social studies preview unit. Today we started Science. We are working on classification for our first unit in Life Science. This is a fun unit and I think they will enjoy the information they learn!

 

Just a reminder that the students are reading a library RC book of their choice and they need to have tested on it by Monday the 16^th. That is the same day that book orders are due. I will be giving the students their new RC books on Monday. Thanks for having them read every  night!!

 

I hope everyone has a great week! As always, please feel free to call me with questions/concerns.

 

Sincerely,

Chris Mallen

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

Email:  chris.mallen@bkcsd.org