Mallen's Monday August 31st

Monday Memo

August 31, 2015

 

Dear Parents,

 

I hope everyone had a relaxing weekend! We have one week under our belts! I am truly enjoying getting to know your children!! They are very inquisitive and keep me on my feet!! We have been learning a lot of different things and I know it can be an overload! I think that as time goes, things will get easier for them.

 

In Reading this week, we will be finishing up on our story “Akiak” that we began last week. It is a great story about a dog that is an important member of an Idiatrod race. I think the students enjoyed it very much. We worked on a variety of skills including comprehension, vocabulary, predicting outcomes, and cause and effect. The plan is to test over the story tomorrow. We will start a new story this week entitled “Grandfather’s Journey”. It is a great story about a man who was born in Japan and then moved to the United States, and moved back and forth due to the love of both countries. Our first unit in Reading is entitled “Journey”. All of the stories the students will be reading will involve some type of journey. It is a fun way to start our reading for the year! We will be working on a variety of skills with this story including:  Vocabulary, Comprehension, Writing in a response journal and using a word web. Our spelling words this week are words with short and long i and o. Grammar this week will be over subjects and predicates. Last week we learned about the different kinds of sentences. We also will be working on SRA which are great little stories with questions and skills that are at the student’s reading level.

 

We are working on place value with our New York Engaged Math program. I have a huge favor to ask of you. We will be doing a multiplication fact sheet every day. The students really need to learn these facts! If you can work with your child 5 minutes each day on those, it will really pay off for them. If they don’t complete the fact sheet, it will be in their yellow folder to complete and return. We also work on a daily review each day. This review helps the kids retain skills in all areas of math! If they don’t finish that in the allotted time,that may be something you will see in their yellow folder that needs to be completed and returned. Everything we do for New York Engaged Math, will be completed at school! I will send home the completed sheets for you to look at. Again, PLEASE try to come up with 5 minutes a night to focus on multiplication facts!! The pay off towards learning them, will be huge in the future!!! Thanks for your part in helping your child with their math skills!!

 

We alternate science and social studies. We are doing science right now. Our first area of science is life science. We are talking about classification of living things. We have talked about the 5 kingdoms of living things and how we classify the different types of animals and plants that we have. We will have our first science test next week at some point. I will let you know details via next week’s Monday Memo which you will receive next Tuesday!

 

Every day we devote a period of time to computer skills. We will also do some interactive science activities during that time. Our librarian is going to come monthly and work with the kids on some resource based websites. We are excited for this opportunity for the kids. We will also have our Counselor Johnson time two times a month. She is still working on her schedule.

 

Thank-you for your help in making sure your child reads each night. By signing your planner, you are verifying that they read for their allotted time. If it isn’t signed, I have them read for 15 minutes during recess to make sure that they read every day. I truly appreciate you helping them with that and with their multiplication facts!!

 

Thank-you for sharing your child with me this school year!! I look forward to the learning opportunities that await all of us this year!! As always, PLEASE call with any questions/concerns you may have!! I like to really tackle any problems right away and I don’t always see everything that is going on…

 

Have a great week!

Chris Mallen

 

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

Email:  chris.mallen@bkcsd.org

Mallen's Monday Memo May 18, 2015

Monday Memo

May 18, 2015

Dear Parents,

I hope everyone had a great weekend! This will be the last Monday Memo for the year. I have tried to include all the information I could think of in this note. We enjoyed Amy Bates  visiting us from the library and talking about the wonderful library program that will be held there!! I encourage everyone to sign up for it! Thank-you to our friends at the Belmond Care Center for treating us to a fabulous lunch on Friday!! That is so awesome that they do that for us every year!! This week we are looking forward to our track meet that will be at 9:00 on Thursday!! We are busy!!

This week in Reading, we will be working on the book Harriet the Spy. It is such a fun book and a great way to end our year. The afternoon of the last day of school, we will be watching the video over this great story!! Our week will have us listening to the story, reading the story, and doing activities over the story. I gave everyone their last RC book of the year, on Friday. Those are due the last day of school, and we will test over them that day, unless they read it sooner, in which case they can quiz early!! I still have a few that need some good scores from their RC quizzes!

In Math, we are going to finally finish module 3! We will be testing over this module this week as well. It will be our final week of math as we will be on our field trip on Tuesday and watching our movie on the last day.

I will be sending home a study guide over our fossils unit  on Thursday, with the test on Friday. It will be our final science grade for the year.

The last day of school, my plan is for the students to bring their own lunch. We will eat in our classroom, do the movie… They can bring whatever you would like for them to bring for their lunch. I thank-you for that!

It has been a pleasure having your children this year! They are all such kind, caring students! I wish them all the best in fifth grade!! I thank-you for sharing them with me!!

Reminders:

May 21:  9:00 Track Meet

May 26^th:  Field Trip to Music Man Square

May 27^th:  Last Day of School. The students are to bring a sack lunch that day.

As always, if you have any questions/concerns, please feel free to give me a call!

Have a great week!
Chris Mallen

Phone:  515-444-3093 (Home)   515-444-4300 ext. 326 (School)

Email:  chris.mallen@bkcsd.org

Mallen's Monday Memo May 7, 2015

Monday Memo

May 4, 2015

Dear Parents,

I hope everyone had a great weekend! We enjoyed our visit from Dirk Vanderlinden. He talked to the kids about what makes a good ad. We thank him for his time with us! We will be spending some time preparing for our fine arts festival which will be held Thursday night. We have counselor time two times this week due to her not being able to meet with the kids last month because of our testing. We also get to go fishing on Monday morning! It will be an eventful week for us!!

This week in Reading, we have finished all of the themes in our reading series!! Great accomplishment!! Our spelling will look a little different this week. We will be working on some spelling skills over a poem entitled “Ode to Spring”. So there won’t be a spelling “list” anymore this week.  Our grammar this week will consist of us doing grammar sentences which review the concepts we have learned all year long. We will also continue with our DOL (Daily Oral Language). For reading time this week we will be working on creating and publishing our ads for the Belmond Independent. The students chose their library books last week and those will be due on May 15^th.

In Math, we are going to be continue to work on interpreting division word problems as a number of groups of a known and unknown size and interpreting and finding whole number quotients and remainders to solve one step division word problems. I still have a few students who truly need to work on memorizing their multiplication facts! That will make division so much easier for them! We also work on a daily division sheet along with our daily reviews.

Three of our Science days this week will be spent with Counselor Johnson. On Thursday,  I will be sending home a study guide for the Science test that will be on Friday.

As always, if you have any questions/concerns, please feel free to give me a call!

Reminders for the week:

May 7:  Fine Arts Festival

May 8:  Fishing with Mrs. Kern

Have a great week!
Chris Mallen

Phone:  515-444-3093 (Home)   515-444-4300 ext. 326 (School)

Email:  chris.mallen@bkcsd.org

Mallen's Monday Memo April 27, 2015

Monday Memo

April 27, 2015

Dear Parents,

I hope everyone had a great weekend! We will be map testing this week. We also are treated to a visit from Dirk Vanderlinden, from the Belmond Independent, who will talk to us about what makes a good ad and from that we will start next week on creating our ads!

This week in Reading we are finishing up on our Nature:  Friend or Foe unit. We will be reviewing the concept of adverbs and prepositional phrases this week during our grammar time. We have a spelling list that reviews words we have this unit and it is attached to this memo. We will also be reading two different stories working on the skills of comprehension, vocabulary, and will be reviewing suffixes and prefixes and what their meaning adds to a word. The students are to have read Sarah, Plain and Tall by Thursday. I am excited to say that most students have gone on to read Skylark, Caleb’s Story and the next one is More Perfect than the Moon. I had lent that book out to a student last year and didn’t get it back and it is not at our school library anymore. It is a good book, and it is at the Belmond Library should any student wish to read it. Their next book for May, due May 15^th, is a library book of their choice.

In Math, we are working on interpreting division word problems as a number of groups of a known and unknown size and interpreting and finding whole number quotients and remainders to solve one step division word problems. We will also be doing our map testing during part of our math time, for three days, so we may not get all done. We will also be working on our daily multiplication pages and our daily review.

We will be map testing for three of our science periods this week. When we resume science, we will be working on the questions to review our rocks and minerals unit. It has been fun taking a look at some of the student’s rock collections!

As always, if you have any questions/concerns, please feel free to give me a call!

Have a great week!
Chris Mallen

Phone:  515-444-3093 (Home)   515-444-4300 ext. 326 (School)

Email:  chris.mallen@bkcsd.org

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

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

Mallen's Monday Memo April 6, 2015

Monday Memo

April 6, 2015

Dear Parents,

I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter break! It is so nice to be enjoying spring!! It seems like we waited a long time for it to come…

This week we are starting a new story about the wildfires at Yellowstone. Again, it goes perfectly with our theme:  Nature:  Friend or Foe. The story talks about the damage the wildfire caused and the good things that came from that. We will be working on the following skills:  Comprehension, Vocabulary, Main Idea, Supporting Details, and analogies.  The grammar lessons this week are over writing with adjectives. We will also discuss the use of the words good and well. The spelling words are attached to this memo.

Just a reminder that your child has a library book for their RC book, which is due to be tested by April 15^th. I appreciate you having them read each night for 20 minutes!!

For math this week we will be working on determining whether a whole number is a multiple of another number. We will also be exploring properties of prime and composite numbers to 100 by using multiples.

We are starting a new unit in Science this week. We will be talking about volcanoes and earthquakes. It goes nicely with our nature theme in reading.

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