November 10, 2014
Dear Parents,
I hope everyone had a
great weekend. We ended our week last week with a Jacobson First Quarter PBIS
reward party. This party involved the entire Jacobson family. The students were
able to come to school with pajamas and for 20 minutes that day, they could
play board games and were able to bring a non caffeinated drink to drink during this party. For second
quarter, only the students that show good behavior during that quarter will be
invited to attend the party. Hopefully the party is enough of an incentive for
the kids to follow our BK rules of: Be
Safe, Care for Others, Do What’s Right and Do Your Best.
This week we are starting
a new unit entitled “Amazing Stories”. All of the stories are fantasy stories.
We will begin the theme this week with a Chris Van Allsburg story entitled “The
Stranger”. This fantasy story talks about how a stranger visits a family and
how because of him, the weather changes. We will be working on the skills
of: Vocabulary, Comprehension, Noting
Details and Strutural Analysis. We will also be reading a few autumn poems. The
story talks about the season of fall. Our spelling words are compound words
this week and the list is attached to this memo. Our grammar moves us away from
nouns and we will begin talking about action verbs. We will weekly continue to
reinforce the different types of nouns through our weekly “grammar sentences”.
I am sure you have seen them come home with your child from time to time. It is
where I put on the board different types of nouns (proper nouns, common nouns,
plural nouns, singular nouns, possessive plural nouns, possessive singular
nouns) and then need to use one of each in a sentence. It is always a challenge
but the more they do it, the better they will get at identifying these nouns
and at writing complete sentences. Most of the students have passed the book
“The Jacket” and are reading a book of their choice to be finished by November
15th. I will be giving them a different book to read at that time.
Thanks, again, for having your child read every night for at least 15 minutes!!
We will be finishing our
first module in math today. Tomorrow we will start our second math module. Our
first lesson will be entitled “Unit Conversions and Problem Solving with Metric
Measurement”. We will also be working on “Expressing metric mass measurements
in terms of a smaller unit”. The program assumes the students had background
information over this in third grade and they haven’t. So, we will be really
backing up a bit and trying to give them the background preparation they will
need to complete this new unit. We are still completing our daily reviews and
daily multiplication sheets. The more we practice with these, the better they
get at it. I find they need the repetition of these math concepts so that they
are “sealed” in their brain for next year. That is why you may see the same
things come home over and over again. We want to learn this forever, not just
for a day.
This week we will be
testing over our plant adaptation unit. We will be working on the new
vocabulary for this unit, doing a science review and then on Thursday I will
send a study guide home with your child over this unit. The test will be on
Friday.
Thanks for all you do to
help me with your child’s education! As always, please call with any questions
or concerns!!
Sincerely,
Chris Mallen
Phone: Home:
444-3093 School: 444-4300 ext 336
Email: chris.mallen@bkcsd.org
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