January 24th-27th!

Gung-Hey-Fat-Choy Parents!

     Happy Year of the Dragon!  This week we will be wrapping up our Science Unit on Weather!  Today you will receiving a weather project to help me ensure that your student understands all of the weather vocabulary and concepts discussed in our unit.  This will also enable you to measure their understanding as many of these concepts will be reviewed in later grades.  Also, it will help keep things fresh in their heads for our Meteorologist visit on Wednesday at 2:30pm.  Please encourage your child to have a good question or two to ask him when he visits. 
     In Reading we are taking a dive back into Fiction books.  Of course, with the "Cafe" your child can choose fiction or non-fiction books to read during our Literacy time but for the next nine weeks we will be focusing our energies on Author's Purpose and writing detailed summaries of the stories that we read as well as making connections.  The important thing is for your student to be able to go back to the story and pull out specific details to support their thinking.  The easiest way for you to help your student is to encourage them to read each night and then model connections that you have with the text.  For example, if your child read Cinderella then you could share about the first time that you read the book or share how you felt like Cinderella when you got married...anything like that.  As for writing, in the coming weeks we will begin writing our personal narrative.  For the time being though, I will push your child to use proper spacing, punctuation, and capitalization.  We are also trying to "decimating" the overused words in our writing and attempting to use more eloquent words.  Your child was given a personal dictionary to help with this.
     Mathematically speaking, your student is reviewing the basics of graphing for this week.  We are reexamining pictographs and all of their features (title, key, named columns, etc) and practicing creating our own.  We will also be creating bar graphs and comparing the different uses for different graphs.  You will find one homework assignment about bar graphs where they will have to create their own measuring objects in the kitchen.  If you have any questions please email me.

Wish List

     Since it is already the middle of the year we are beginning to run out of things in the classroom.  If anyone would like to donate the following items to the class all of the Heroes would be grateful.  We could use:
                    -colored expo markers
                    --notebook paper
                   -#8 pencils (nothing fancy)
                    -crayons

Important Dates
    *Healthy Hunter will be sending home an announcement next
     week...get ready for some heart healthy information about
     Healthy Heart Month & find out ways to keep your student from
     becoming sweeter around Valentines Day.
     *Readathon begins on TOMORROW!
     *One Hunter Family Night is Friday, January 27th starting at 4pm for the students and 5 pm for the parents.
     *Yearbook orders can be sent in by February 15th for the early bird price of $14, after that the price goes up to $17.