April 9th-13th

Welcome Back Students and Parents!

     I hope that you are all well-rested and ready for the next eight weeks of school!  The break seemed to fly by for me, but I'm even more afraid that the rest of the year is going to fly by too.  We still have a lot of educational objectives to hit in order for your child to be ready for 3rd Grade.  The natural reaction to Spring is to kind of relax and coast through the rest of the year, some people call it "Spring Fever" but let me allay any concerns you have.  We HH (Harvey Heroes) are going to continue to go full throttle until the end of the year.  With great expectations come great rewards and I know that with our continued focus on academics your child will be ready to lead the pack next year!

Here is what you can expect for your child to be working on over the next week or two...

Reading:  We are exploring genres such as historical fiction, humorous stories, and mysteries.  Hopefully, your child will be bringing home books from our school library which fall into these genres.  Specifically, we are exploring the structure of these texts (do they follow the setting/characters/plot/problem/ solution?) and discussing why we would read these genres. 

Writing:  Over the few weeks your child will continue to work on writing paragraphs (4 or 5 complete sentences about a topic).  It is important that your child master concepts such as starting sentences with capital letters, using descriptive adjectives, and ending the sentences with a punctuation mark.  Writing paragraphs will lead into the next big concept of researching animals and generating our own non-fiction reports.

Math:  In Math we are continuing to explore strategies to solve multiple step math problems.  There is still some difficulty when solving word problems as to which operation to perform (addition or subtraction).  Please continue to remind your student to ask themselves if the answer they get makes sense.  Most times students are able to understand where they went wrong when I probe them however, my goal is for them to realize this themselves so that next year they will achieve to their full potential on all their assessments.

Science:  I am excited to say that we are kicking off our unit on SOUND this week!  Be sure to pick up a pair of earplugs as your child may be coming home this week with some rather random sounding homework.  We also will be having our High Touch/High Tech In-House Field Trip this Thursday.  Our time is from 11:05-12:40 but we will be eating lunch from 10:30-11am so that your child will not be to hungry to concentrate on all the fun experiments.

Social Studies:  I want to start by saying how wonderful all of the projects were!  The students demonstrated a lot of pride in their work and of course the class learned best by learning for themselves.  I can see that many of the students have become more comfortable in front of an audience and are better able to explain their ideas.  Thank you parents for any help you offered your child.  This week we will be wrapping up our land form unit.  We will have a short assessment on Friday but do not worry about how difficult it will be.  All of the students should know everything that will be asked.  Hopefully, you've learned a little bit too about some of America's diverse regions.

FYI:  The Titanic Sank on April 15th, 1912 (although it struck the iceberg on the 14th).  As it is the 100th anniversary, your student will have a short lesson on Friday on the engineering behind the Titanic, class structure that existed back then, and be introduced to a few of the famous passengers (think J.J. Astor & The Unsinkable Molly Brown).  My goal is to pique your child's interest in this topic and encourage them to learn more about it.  I know that Keith O'Brien has been ravenous about this topic all year).
       Hunter Heritage is April 20th (next Friday).  Please plan on coming to attend this school wide fellowship.  In fact, if you come please feel free to swing by the dunking booth where I'll be for ten minutes (poor pitchers only, good pitchers need not attend).
      Friday from 1:50-2:35 we will have our 3rd Quarter PBIS celebration!  Please do not plan on checking your child out during this time.  We will be in the gym and it may be hard to hear the office asking for your child.  If you do need to check your child out early that day please let me know in the morning so that I can plan accordingly.
     Report Cards go home on next Monday (April 16th).  Spirit Week also kicks off next week.  As it is a major milestone for our school I encourage everyone to motivate your students to participate in all the daily activities (hat day, etc.).  Middle Schoolers do not get to generally participate all week like we do here in elementary.  There should be a pink letter in your Monday Folder describing all of the fun we will have next week!

      Have a terrific week back and thank you all for reading! 
                              
                                    Sincerely,

                                                   Mr. H