October 24, 2008

Upcoming Dates

Monday, October 27th: NO SCHOOL – Staff Learning Day
Teachers will be having a staff development workshop on that day to write our school vision plan and to brainstorm ways to improve our school culture.

Friday, October 31st: Halloween
Students will need to bring their costume to school in their backpack or in a bag labeled with their name. After lunch, students have time to change into their costumes, and the school parade will be outside on the blacktop starting around 1:30pm. You may come to take pictures during this time. Afterwards, we will have some snacks and play games outside with Mrs. Byers’ class. Thank you for those of you who volunteered to donate food and items for our party this time (the list is attached). We will take turns donating food for our parties throughout the year.

Sunday, November 2nd: Daylight Savings
Don’t forget to change your clocks back one hour!

Monday, November 3rd: October Book-It Reading Logs Due!
Remember to read every evening and complete the reading log we sent home earlier this month! Students who complete their reading logs will receive a certificate for a Pizza Hut personal pizza (and even if you do not like pizza, please remember to read every day!)


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Dear Families,

Thank you for the kind book donations I received over the past few days. It was a perfect opportunity for me to start sharing praise notes with the class. Students (and myself) can write a praise note for another person who does something extra kind or special for them. It is part of our school Peacebuilders program and pledge.

Mrs. Rowe, Mrs. Zankich, Mrs. Bachelor, Ms. Wolter and I attended a 2 day conference on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. We learned about different ways of assessing student work and how we can use assessments to guide individual learning. This will be something that our Eaton leadership team will be sharing with the Eaton staff in the next few months. Since returning from my absence, I have noticed a difference in classroom behavior and am needing to go over many classroom rules and procedures again. Most of the reminders are over being good listeners to the teacher and classmates, focusing during work time, and less talking when others are talking. Please continue to speak with your child!

Here are some highlights for the week:
• Language Arts:
Poem of the Week: First Book
Song of the Week: Making Words
Kindness is: saying, “Happy Halloween,” when I go trick-or-treating
Word Wall Words: find, have, one, to, who
Story of the Week: Alice and Greta, The Big Hit, Big Pig
Word Families: -it, -ig
Sounds: b, r, h, g, and short i
Strategy and Skill Focus: Evaluate and Cause/Effect
Grammar: Punctuation (periods, question marks, exclamation marks)

• Math: We are now in Chapter 4 on Data and Graphs. This week, we practiced voting for different things and showed our results using tally marks and charts. We are learning to make picture graphs and bar graphs. Again, we are practicing our magic words to help us solve word problems including: more, less, greater, smaller, how many more/less, in all, etc.

• Science: We are busy trying to finish our Solids and Liquids unit. This week, we explored solids in liquid and tried to predict whether the solids would sink or float! We also had opportunities to feel and touch different small solids and make our own observations about them.

• Social Studies: We resumed our Tuesday circuits with the first grade classrooms now that conferences are over. This week, we went to Mrs. Nieveen’s class and learned about Me on the Map. We talked about our home, our community, our city, our state, our country, and our world.

• Computer Lab: This week, we went to the Foss website: www.fossweb.com and completed a neat activity about solids and liquids. We were able to pretend to put different solids in the oven to see what would happen, and we put various liquids in the freezer to see what would happen.

• Assembly: We had two assemblies this week. One was a special presentation at the Cupertino Library. We watched a play called, “Green Golly and The Treasure of Light” which used wonderful music during the play. The other assembly was at school on Wednesday from the Traveling Lantern performance group. They acted out a play called, “Caterpillar Hunter.”

• Music: We saw Miss Rachel this week. We sang Halloween songs this week including a monster dance song, a black cat rhythm song, and we used chalk to draw pictures of Halloween characters we heard in a song.

Today was the annual Eaton Walk-a-thon! I hope you were able to attend part of it because it really is fun and exciting to see the entire school outside walking! Thank you for trying to collect pledges and donations for our school and returning the envelopes on time!

Have a great weekend!