November News From Room 12
Dear Room 12 Families,
As we enter our third month of school, I am reminded of how quickly this year has started and about all of the fun and exciting times we have ahead as the holidays approach. October was filled with conferences, Fall Festival, the book fair, and our Halloween parade and party. It was a busy month and all of us in Room 12 are looking forward to more wonderful learning experiences.
Fondly,
Mrs. Maher
DATES TO REMEMBER
Sharing is this week Nov 2-6th
Nov. 11th: no school
Nov. 18th: report cards sent home
Nov. 23rd-27th Thanksgiving recess
CURRICULUM
Literature: We have finished our Nature Walk Theme and will be doing some assessments to ensure that all students grasped and extended the concepts they learned. We will be jumping right into our next theme, Around Town. This theme focuses on Neighborhood and Community and will cover skills such as th, ch, wh, and sh words, the vowel sound in cow, nouns that change the spelling in the plural, special nouns, problem solving, making inferences, and sequence of events. We have been developing our reading “stamina” in Reader’s Workshop. Students are now reading for a full 30 minutes. We will begin partner sharing this month for another 5-10 minutes. In this month’s unit, we will be focusing on favorite book characters . Each student will create a character study of 2 characters.
Writing: As you know, we are deep into our Writer’s Workshop and I have already seen a difference in the quality of the students’ work. Our next unit of study is Realistic Fiction. Students will be writing stories that reflect every day problems. Characters will be fictitious, but may be based on people they know. This month our featured author is Marc Brown, most famous for his Arthur books. We will study his craft and learn how he uses Realistic Fiction in his stories.
Math: During November, we will be focusing on mental addition and subtraction and learning strategies that help. Our math explorations centers are up and running. Thank you volunteers for making them possible. I hope you’re having fun with math!
Science: This month in science, we will be finishing up our study of plants and animals. We will be making bird’s nests in class as part of the lab work in our new science series. Mr. Lukas has let us put our carved pumpkins (from math centers last week) in the garden, so the students can watch the process of decomposition. They still look pretty cute! We have sent our avocado plants home and hopefully your children are noticing some changes taking place. Keep an eye on them. Your child has a journal that was sent with the plant. Please have them record the changes. I will be asking that the completed journals be returned to school later in the year.
Additional Notes:
I wanted to thank all the families who purchased books from the Book Fair for our classroom: The Porterfield’s, the Wight’s and the George’s. We are enjoying the books! I hope I didn’t forget anyone.
Homework
Please continue to remind your children to get their homework returned on Friday in their Monday Envelopes. It would really help if the math pages were stapled or clipped to the homework packets. Homework turned in late gets marked as late and will be reflected on the report card if it occurs regularly. Take-home book bags are a part of the homework assignment and should be returned with the Monday Folder.
Thanks for helping with this.
I am looking forward to a great month!
Lisa Maher
