Mallen's Monday Memo April 20, 2015

Monday Memo

April 20, 2015

Dear Parents,

I hope everyone had a great weekend!  We finished the Iowa Assessments last week! This year we only did two reading tests, two math tests, and a social studies and science test. We didn’t test over an hour each of the three days. The students were treated to a snack and milk each day. This week we will be doing the MAP tests, which are a computerized test. It may be next week before we get to it. We are also going to be starting our ads that we create for the Belmond Independent. It is always a fun activity for the kids and once they are published in the paper, we will receive a copy for each student to take home to youJ So, we will be keeping busy these final weeks!

This week we are starting a new story about frontier life and the effects a drought had on their life. I am sure many of you will remember reading the wonderful book Sara, Plain and Tall. This excerpt that we will be reading comes from the second book in the series entitled Skylark. We will be covering a variety of skills throughout this chapter. We will be talking about Comprehension, Vocabulary, Sequencing, Word Roots, and working on the parts of speech part of the dictionary. Our grammar this week is over prepositional phrases. Our spelling words are attached to this memo.

On April 15^th, I gave the students their next RC book. The book is mentioned above. It is Sara, Plain and Tall. I appreciate you having them read each night for 20 minutes!! I was so pleased with how well most of the students did reading their RC book for April 15^th. This was the first time this year, the majority passed the RC quiz! I am thrilled!! Let’s do it again on April 30^th and this time everyone pass their quiz!!

For math this week we will be working on representing numerically 4D dividend division with divisors of 2,3,4, and 5, decomposing a remainder of up to 3X. We will also be solving division problems with a zero in the dividend or in a quotient. Again, thanks for working on those multiplication facts with the students each night. It truly makes their math that much easier! We are still working on our daily fact sheets and our daily reviews!

We tested over our earthquake and volcano unit on Friday. I sent the results home with your child. This week we are starting a unit on rocks and minerals. We will be answering a few questions this week. Those questions are: What are Minerals? What are Rocks? What is the Rock Cycle? Hopefully by the end of this week, the students will have some answers to those questions.

I hope everyone has a great week!! As always, please call with any questions/concerns!! Thanks for all you do for your children!

Have a great week!
Chris Mallen

Phone:  (Home)  444-3093    (School)  444-4430 Ext. 336

Email:  chris.mallen@bkcsd.org