Dear Parents,                                                     January 31, 2011

What a busy week!!  It is Catholic Schools Week this week and we have something special planned every day.  Groundhog Day is Wednesday as well as the 100th day of school – more celebrating!  Friday is Chinese New Year and Parents Day.  I hope that you can spend the morning with us.  We will start off with mass at 8:30 and hope that you sit with us during mass.  After mass we will go to recess and then enjoy the classroom visits.

We are starting theme 6 in our reading series this week – Animal Adventures.  Our reading strategy is summarizing and our comprehension skill is story structure.  Knowing the setting, characters, problem, events in trying to solve the problem, and the ending will help us summarize the story.  Our phonics focus is the long /o/ sound spelled with the CVCe pattern or CV (as is go) and the long /u/ sound spelled with the CVCe pattern.  We will also work on the final clusters of ft, lk, and nt.  Our spelling words are from unit 22 and all have the long /o/ sound.  (Don’t forget about spellingcity.com!)  Our grammar focus is on naming words for people and animals.  We will also spend some time reading about Groundhog Day, and Chinese New Year as well as, working on a fun writing project for 100th day.

Math this week, finds us working on counting numbers and grouping them in tens and ones.  We might just make 100 for 100th day!  In religion, we are continuing with how God calls us to be His apostles.  We are also going to continue with our study of natural resources in social studies this week.

Please remind your child to bring their library book to school tomorrow so that they may check out a new one.

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

Last week, Mr. Oliphant visited our school with two fellow military friends and shared with the children how much it means to receive cards and messages from home.  Candy Grams are available all this week.  The cost is $.50 and includes two chocolate candies.  Mr. Oliphant assures us that they will warm the hearts of our service men and women.  Please try and support this worthy cause.

Friday is Parents Day and a noon dismissal day as the teachers have a staff meeting.

Have a wonderful week.  If you have any questions or concerns please let me know.

Mrs. Manning