Dear Parents,                                                     January 3, 2011

Happy New Year!  I hope that you all enjoyed a peaceful, restful, and blessed Christmas. I want to thank everyone for the wonderful gifts and warm thoughts sent my way – I truly felt the blessings of the season.

A new year – and what a school year we have planned!   We are starting theme 5 (Home Sweet Home) in our reading series.  Our reading strategy is questioning and the comprehension skill that will help us with that strategy is compare and contrast.  We will practice this skill using a Venn diagram.  Our phonics focus is on the consonant digraphs, th, wh, sh, ch, and tch.  We will also review triple clusters and the short sound of /u/. Our spelling words are from unit 17 and concentrate on the digraphs sh and ch. This is the last week with six basic words and one challenge word; next week the words jump to ten basic words and two challenge words.  Our grammar focus is on exclamatory sentences – sentences that express strong emotion and end with an exclamation point.  We are taking a bit of a break (at least in our textbook) from the fact families and will be working on sorting data and recording the information on tally charts, bar graphs and picture graphs as well as learning how to solve problems using the data.  We will however, still be practicing our fact families in our math centers.  Religion finds us finishing up our study of the birth of Jesus and focusing on the Holy Family.  We will concentrate on science this week and review environments and how animals meet their needs in their environment, including finding energy.

Please remind your child to bring their library book to school tomorrow so that they may check out a new one.  Book-It for December was due today.  If you forgot it today, please send it to school tomorrow.  January’s book-it will be due January 31, 2011.

Water bottle sales continue on Tuesday and Thursday.  Thank you for your support!

Have a wonderful week.

Mrs. Manning