WINTER WEATHER

Please send slippers or shoes for your child to change into if they have boots on. Wearing boots all day makes their feet sore. Be sure your child comes with the proper outside clothing.

Please observe the parking regulations. Now that we have an afterschool program, there are buses bringing students here from other schools to participate. Those buses arrive about the same time we are dismissing walkers and riders. There is not enough room for them to unload students when parents park their cars in our unloading drive. Your consideration for these drivers and their students’ safety is appreciated.

Call-In

Parents are reminded that according to the school handbook (which went home at the beginning of the year) they are to call the school if their child is going to be absent for the day. As explained in the handbook, this is a precautionary safety measure to ensure that all students are where their families intend them to be, i.e. no child has been left asleep on a bus, wandered off while walking to school, or worse, been abducted. Please help us keep your children safe.

Kindergarten

Happy Holidays! Thank you all for coming to the Christmas concert. Having ours first was helpful in lifting the Christmas spirit. The children all did so well and they looked just beautiful.
This month in math you will notice we have sent home many symmerical ornaments cut from construction paper. Symmetry is a part of math this year. We are beginning functions of addition. Play games in the car using numbers under 6 to practice adding. The Monster Squeeze game is so popular. We are looking for a number less than or greater than another. What's My Rule is another game the children are enjoying. It is the process of observing how many objects are added or taken away form a given number.
Letters we have learned are: M,T,F,H,N,B,A,E,I,O,U,and P.
Help your child make words with these letters.
We are finding printing to be a bit hard if we have a letter like p that falls below the line.
Reading theme is "In the Barnyard". Words you can ask your child to recognize are:
I, my, said,the, red, orange, yellow, green ,blue, purple,black and brown, one two three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten.
I hope you are still reading with your child. Remember to send in your December calendar.

Grade 1

First graders are reading up a storm! Some days it's difficult to pull these guys away from books. Several students are beginning to read chapter books at school as well as at home. It is so interesting to see the reading process grow and develop with this age. As always, the more your child "practices" reading at home as well as school, the better reading they will become.
Don't forget the Pizza Hut reading incentive. If you do not have a Pizza Hut Reading Record at home for one reason or another, the children know the books can be recorded on any type of paper as long as Mom or Dad signs it. A free personal pan pizza is the reward each month your child returns his/her record sheet.
We are beginning to work on measurement in math. Measuring with lots of "different" items. We are also learning to measure with rulers (inches, centimeters, etc.). We continue to count by 10, 5, 2, 1 from any starting point (0 - 110) and count forward and backward. Most everyone is using the number grid easily now (great job!).
Money continues to be a tough area for us. I hope you are able to find some time at home to practice counting dimes, nickels, and pennies with your child. Mixed coins from piggy banks or pocket change would be a good way to practice counting small amounts of change. Thanks so much for your help.
Jan Brett was our Author of the Month for December. We thoroughly enjoyed her incredible illustrations in many of her books. We also learned that Jan Brett retells a lot of stories from other authors. Many of the animals that are found in her books are based on drawings she does of her own animals. Some of the stories we enjoyed this month were The Hat; The Wild Christmas Reindeer; The Mitten; Goldilocks.
We finished our unit in social studies on the earth. We learned that we live in a pretty special area of Maine. We learned that we have lots of different types of land formations and water sources; that Piscataquis County (we're still practicing how to say Piscataquis correctly) has the largest lake, the tallest mountain, and the fewest people in Maine living in our county. Having the Piscataquis River running through the middle of our town is pretty cool, too. Climate, the equator, the artic, deserts, seasons have also been discussed at great length. It's an interesting topic to study.
I hope you all had a relaxing holiday season with your family and friends and are looking forward to a healthy, prosperous new year!

Second graders have had a busy December. We have learned many new concepts. We are now in the middle of our FRIENDS theme in language arts. In addition to writing stories, we have learned to write letters. We are reading lots of theme related books. We will not complete this theme until the end of January.
Our math is quite challenging. We have been practicing two digit addition, and learned some subtraction strategies. In January we will continue with subtraction and be introduced to multiplication. We have been doing addition Mad Minutes every day. We will continue with addition facts until the end of January, then will switch to subtraction facts.
In science we have finished the weather segment of this unit. In January we will learn more about the seasons. Health for the remainder of this quarter focuses on our senses and a few body organs.
We will learn about suburbs in social studies. As a follow up to life in cities, suburbs, and on farms we will do a project which will involve using empty food boxes to make buildings. Please save and send in at least one box with your child by January 15. Thank you.

In Literacy we’re beginning a new unit called”Disaster!”. We’re reading stories about some famous and not so famous disasters in history. Currently we’re reading a story about the sinking of the Titanic entitled “Titanic...Lost and Found”This unit is developing a greater significance this year with the attack of the World Trade Center in New York City.
In Writing Workshop we’ve been working on writing personal narratives. Most students like to write about the things they’ve experienced.
We are in our 4th unit in Math... Multiplication and Division. We’ve been doing lots of number stories, using arrays, creating number models, and learning the basic multiplication and division facts. (fact power) Please help your child to memorize basic multiplication and division facts up through the 5s.
In Social Studies we are studying about the Cheyenne people in Great Plains region of our country. We are learning about their food, their homes, and what they did for fun. We are learning how the buffalo played a vital role in their survival as a people.
• Make sure all papers go to and from
home in the red folders.
• If parents need to contact me, you may
phone me at school, or if you have
email, my address at school is... marthers@sad4.com

We will soon be finishing our mystery theme called “Super Sleuths” in language arts. Many students have enjoyed reading some of our classroom library’s mystery series. They have even been asking their classmates to hurry and finish the next book so they can read it. It’s such a reward to see them enjoy good books!
Learning to write a descriptive essay has been another fun activity. Favorite stuffed animals visited the classroom for one week of descriptive writing, and anonymous shoes were another week’s focus. We’ve learned to consider the five senses when describing things, and to use comparisons to help readers identify with what we are writing about. (We even discovered the fun version of Rudolph is full of these comparisions!)
Progress is being made by many students on our weekly multiplication facts tests. The children are enjoying watching their bar graph and line graph grow as they make this progress. Please continue 10-15 minutes daily practice at home. Students can practice with a parent while setting the table, washing the dishes, riding in the car, etc. They can also practice during TV commercials, while brushing their teeth, or waiting for the bus.
We’ve just begun to learn to multiply numbers such as 78x65. A good foundation of the basic facts makes this much easier. Don’t be alarmed at some of the methods your child may show you to reach the product to these problems. As you’ve seen in addition and subtraction, the math program introduces more than one algorithm for each type of computation. You are more than welcome to demonstrate the way you do it, or even have a competition to see who can get the product faster! That would be good practice.
We are also going to be learning to read and write numbers into the billions (Find examples of such numbers in magazines or newspapers to read together.) and to use estimation skills.
In our Maine studies we’ve been learning of Maine’s earliest inhabitants. Please read and discuss the Maine Studies newspaper when your child brings it home. There are also some great craft ideas in each issue for inside home fun.
We’ll soon begin a science unit on electricity. We’ll be learning about open and closed circuits, parallel and series circuits, and other topics. This hands on unit always “sparks” a lot of interest!

We have finished theme tests from the reading programs and unit tests in math. Writing experiences for December have included a persuasive letter and a group effort at a persuasive essay.
Our second graders even learned the words to "the Twelve days of Christmas" this month. They sang it perfectly a number of times during music class and at least three times on the day of the concert. However, they may have had stage fright on the night of the concert, and their hard work wasn't so evident. At any rate, we all enjoyed our Christmas concert!
Happy New year.

In the Title 1 program, the kindergarten students have been steadily adding to their ABC books. So far they have 8 letters along with a picture that begins with that letter. They are also making their own books and are very proud that they can read their book.
The first and second graders in the Early Success program have read 12 books so far this year. They have been applying their early reading strategies such as finding a little word in a big word or thinking of a word that rhymes with the word. They enjoy such word games as "Sound Hound" and "Show Me."
The third and fourth grade Soar To Sucess students have been reading some very interesting books. In third grade, we learned about recycling in " Where Does The Garbage Go?". In fourth grade, we learned about peregrine falcons. Scarlett is a peregreine falcon who built her nest on a skyscraper in " Falcons Nest On Skyscrapers". Ask a fourth grader what an ornithologist does.

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