First of December

Upcoming Dates

Tuesday, December 5th: Family Night at the Book Fair 6:00pm-8:00pm
Our regular Eaton library visits on Friday mornings were cancelled this week and next week because of the Book Fair. Therefore, our next Eaton library visit will be on Friday, December 15th.

Monday, December 11th – Friday, December 15th: No Homework Packets
I will not be sending home homework packets the week before Winter Recess, so there will be no spelling or vocabulary test because of the holidays. However, please continue to prepare your child’s sharing and continue reading daily for 15 minutes for the Book-It! Reading Log. Remember the reading logs are due when we come back after Winter Recess. *** Friday parent volunteers: You do not need to come help on Friday, December 15th. Thank you!***

Thursday, December 14th: Cupertino Library Field Trip
If it is not raining, we are planning on going to the Cupertino Library. Please remember to send your child to school with his or her library card. They must also remember their 4-digit PIN number.

Friday, December 15th: Polar Express Party
This will be a special day to celebrate the holidays! We will be doing activities and games based off of the story, The Polar Express, by Chris Van Allsburg. It will also be a pajama day (because we are pretending to be the children in the train)! Please send your child to school in their favorite pajamas and they can also bring one stuffed animal or pillow too.

Monday, December 18th to January 1nd: NO SCHOOL – Winter Recess
School will resume on Tuesday, January 2rd.

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December 1, 2006

AHHH! It is so cold! I hope all of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend. I read about some of your trips in the children’s Weekend News journals. It sounded like all of them had a great time! I enjoyed my trip to Taiwan and Japan very much. It was my first time in Japan and I thought it was beautiful. Plus, the food everywhere was delicious! In Taiwan, I attended my cousin’s wedding and saw many relatives that I haven’t seen for 6 years. I had a nice time.

Thank you for your generous donations of canned food to the Second Harvest Food Bank this week. It is important to teach students about having a giving heart.

We began Star of the Week this week. Each week I will choose a new Star who brings home a poster on Monday and returns it Friday of the same week. The Star of the Week should practice reading the poster with a nice and loud voice. He or she gets to also bring Beebear home for the weekend and writes a journal entry about what they did with Beebear over the weekend. Please return Beebear on Monday and be ready to share your poster and your journal! Sammy was randomly selected as our first Star of the Week.

Here are some highlights from the week:
Poem of the Week: I Heard a Bird Sing
Song of the Week: Skip Counting
Kindness is … reading a book to someone.
Story of the Week: Jessie Bear, What Will You Wear?
Vocabulary of the Week: People 4
Word Wall Words: animal, bird, cold, fall, flower, full, look, of, see
Next Week’s Sharing: Riddle – favorite holiday (remember 4 complete sentence clues and a picture or object hidden in a bag.)
• Language Arts: Theme 3 All Together Now – Week 1
• Stories: Seasons
• Word Families: –ack (tack, sack) and -ap (cap, gap, map)
• Sounds: double final consonants, short a, plurals with -s
• Grammar: What is a Sentence?
• Social Studies: We started our Winter Holiday book and will be completing it in the next 3 weeks. We are studying different holidays around the world and learning about the world map. This week, we learned about Christmas in Holland, Germany, and Mexico.
• Science: We finished our Solids and Liquids unit this week. We went to the computer lab and played with a fun website that let us see what happened to solids and liquids in the oven and the freezer.

I have not received everyone’s November BOOK-IT! Reading Log. Please make sure you return the form. Thank you to Patricia and her family for sharing early Christmas presents for our class. It is a very thoughtful present and much work must have gone into making them. If you have not opened it yet, put it under the Christmas tree =) I hope all of you have a nice weekend. I cannot believe how fast time is going – already in December! See you on Monday!