Mallen's Monday Memo October 13, 2014

Monday Memo

October 13, 2014

Dear Parents,

I hope everyone had a great weekend! Last week we enjoyed our fire truck rides and the information we got from the firemen!! We truly appreciate the service they offer for our community! We also were entertained by some older students telling the students about 4H! I think many of the students were interested in joining one of the 4Hclubs!!

This week we are beginning a new story in reading today. It is a story entitled Tonya’s Reunion. This story is about a girl who gets to know her parents better by going back to their birthplace. We will be learning a variety of skills this week including:  Vocabulary, Comprehension, using a graphic organizer to organize your thoughts, comparing/contrasting and making inferences. Our grammar lessons this week are on singular and plural nouns. Our spelling words have the long and short oo sound. The list is attached to this memo. On Wednesday, the students’ RC books quiz is due (Oct. 15). They were all given an Encyclopedia Brown book to have read and passed by the 15^th. Many of them have read a few of them. For those that haven’t, Wednesday is the day to have that done. As I said in prior Monday Memo’s, this was a book above some of the student’s reading lexile. I said I was fine with you reading it to them, a sibling, you a page them a page… I just like how they have to use some critical thinking to solve these cases! Then next book is one of my favorites and is a historical fiction book. It is called Bound for Oregon. My plan for this wonderful book is to read a chapter a day to them and have them go home and read a chapter each night. For some of them, it may require you reading it to them, as above. They will be listening to me read all odd chapters. We will be doing some activities over this story as well. We will have this book done and ready to be quizzed before the last day in October and so hopefully they will have a chance to read and pass one more quiz. By passing two quizzes a month, they get a 3 because that is our standard. If they pass more than 3 quizzes in the month, they will receive a 4 for part of their comprehension grade.

We will be finishing up on our NE region of the United States. I am sending home a study guide on Thursday, for the test that will be Friday. I truly appreciate your time in going through it with them.

This week in Math, we are working on using place value understanding to decompose to smaller units up to three times using the standard algorithm and apply the algorithm to solve word problems using tape diagrams. We will also be using place value understanding to fluently decompose to smaller units multiple times in any place using the standard subtraction algorithm and apply it to solve word problems using tape diagrams.

We are fortunate this week to have Counselor Johnson come two times this week!

As always, please call with any questions/concerns!

Have a great week!
Chris Mallen

Phone:  444-3093 (Home)   444-4300 (School)

Email:  chris.mallen@bkcsd.org