March 16, 2007

Upcoming Dates

* Thursday, March 22nd: Book Orders Due and Report Cards Go Home
If you would like to purchase books, please make ONE check payable to Scholastic Book Clubs. We will receive the books before the April spring break. Students will be receiving the second trimester grades as well as the scores from the CELDT (California English Language Development Test) that was taken in the Fall. Since there’s no school Friday, homework and library books need to be brought back on Thursday, March 22nd. Also, Friday sharers need to be ready to share on Thursday!

* Friday, March 23rd: No School – Staff Learning Day
The teachers will be working on writing assessments and additional Peacebuilder activities.

* Thursday, March 29th: Guadalupe River Park Field Trip
I have not received everyone’s permission slip that was in last week’s Friday Folder. Please sign and return the permission slip ASAP. Please remember to pack a BAG LUNCH that can be thrown away at the park. We are NOT allowing anyone to purchase food or drinks. Thank you for so many of you who wanted to volunteer. Unfortunately, we can only have 4 parents come with us and the first four permission slips I received were from the parents of: Jonathan, Mayu, Patricia, and Yo. We will be leaving at 11:00am from school and returning at 2:30pm.

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Dear Families,

Here are some highlights from the week:
Star of the Week: Patricia
Poem of the Week: Wearing of the Green
Song of the Week: The Water Cycle
Kindness is … keeping in touch with people.
Story of the Week: Where the Wild Things Are
Vocabulary of the Week: House 2
Word Wall: again, both, gone, hard, turn, want
Next Week’s Sharing: Riddle – something very small
(Hide a small object or picture in a bag and prepare at least four
complete sentences to give the class clues.)
• Language Arts: Theme 7 We Can Work it Out: Week 1
• Stories: That Toad is Mine!
• Word Families: -ow (long o) – tow, mow, row
• Sounds: vowel pairs oa, ow (boat, bow, toad, tow)
• Grammar: Proper Nouns for People and Animals

• Writing: We are progressing quickly in Writer’s Workshop. This week we talked about all 5 stages of the writing process: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and some students are already publishing their first piece on Weather! I am excited to see the students working independently.

• Math: This week we discussed symmetry, fractions (one-half, one-third, and one-fourth), and probability! We also reviewed positional vocabulary word (near, far, next to, above, etc) and shapes.

• Social Studies: Happy St. Patrick’s Day! This week we learned about the country of Ireland, and how they celebrate this special holiday. We talked about leprechauns and read stories too. Let’s see if the leprechauns visit us over the weekend!

• Science: This week we talked about rain and thought of describing words. We made umbrellas to hang in the classroom! In addition, we did an activity to find out our class’ favorite weather! Hot weather was the favorite!

• Computer: We used Graph Club this week to graph our favorite weather. We saw line graphs, bar graphs, pie charts, picture graphs, and tables.

Congratulations to Catherine, Geoffrey, Hitoharu, Lenny, Mayu, Moe, Reva, and Sammy on doing a wonderful job at the Kindness presentation on Tuesday evening. They memorized several sentences and shared our Kindness website with the Cupertino District board members. They got an outstanding ovation and even shook hands with all the board members. I am very proud of them!