April 10, 2009

Upcoming Dates
* Monday, April 13th to Friday, April 17th: Spring Break
No school! Enjoy your vacation!

* Friday, April 24th: Spring Portraits & Cupertino Library
Order envelopes will be sent home the day before. These are individual pictures. In the afternoon we will be walking to the Cupertino Library. Please remember to send your child’s BLUE library card and practice his/her 4-digit PIN number! They will check out 2 books each and please return them to the library at your own convenience.

* Monday, April 27th: If You Give a Pig a Pancake Field Trip
Thank you for returning the permission slip for this field trip. We had several volunteers to chaperone, but unfortunately we can only take one parent on this trip. Mr. Feve (Emilie’s father) will be coming with our class. We will return by lunchtime to Eaton.

* Friday, May 8th: First Grade Musical (afternoon: Time TBD)
On Wednesday, I sent home a blue paper with all of the words to the songs that we will be performing. Please have your child practice memorizing the words.

* Thursday, May 21st: Intent to Return form due
In today’s Friday Folder, there is another paper that must be returned to Eaton School. It asks you to share whether or not your child will be returning to Cupertino during the next school year. Please fill it out and send it back to our class.

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Dear Families,

Here are some highlights from the week:
Star of the Week: Ryan
Poem of the Week: Baby Chick
Song of the Week: Water Cycle
Kindness is … offering free hugs.
Word Wall: always, arms, body, seven, eight, ready, warm
Next (2) Week’s Sharing: Riddle – something from Earth or nature
(at least 4 sentences memorized and picture/object to show)

• Language Arts: Theme 8 Our Earth – Week 2
• Strategy and Skill Focus: Evaluate, Topic/Main Idea
• Word Families: words that rhyme with out and down
• Sounds: vowel pairs ou, ow, and syllables
• Grammar: Present Tense

• Math: We finished up our chapter on addition and subtraction facts to 20 and started Chapter 11 in our math books on Time and Calendar. This week we talked about words such as before and after, and practiced sequencing events in order. We also learned how to write and tell time by the hour and half hour, and used the vocabulary words, minute hand and hour hand.

• Writing: Our second step in Writer’s Workshop is taking our outlines and drafting them. We practiced indenting our paragraphs and on Wednesday, we also reviewed the proper way to revise our writing, or make it better. First, we used a sample writing piece and tried to find different mistakes in capitalization, punctuation, or spelling. Then, we tried to fix our own writing and make it better.

• Circuit: This was our last weather circuit. We went to Mrs. Barelli’s classroom and she taught us about wind and air. We made a little pinwheel on pencils and brought them home on Tuesday.

• Science: In our Air and Weather unit, this week we explored air pressure and compression using syringes. We learned the parts of a syringe: the barrel and the plunger, and used plastic tubes and bottles to test how air moves. We found out that even though we can’t see air, air still takes up space. We even learned how to make a water fountain using air pressure and water. Yesterday, we used balloons and experimented with making our own rockets!

• Social Studies: One of our songs in music is about giving four hugs a day to people we love. We talked about how a hug cheers others up and that it makes people happy. We practiced asking for permission and giving others hugs around school. Also, our Eaton Student Council has begun our Sierra Leone fundraiser. This week’s challenge was to bring in 50 cents if you sleep in a bed every night. Children in Sierra Leone do not have beds to sleep in, so we talked about how we are very fortunate to have the homes that we have, and that we can help them by donating a little bit of money. This fundraiser will last until the end of the school year, so you can donate anytime.

• Computer: We continued illustrating and writing our adaptations of the story, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Students are slowly beginning to understand how to save their work and transfer pictures from Kidpix into their Powerpoint slides. This is difficult for many students because it requires them to go through several steps, however they are learning to independently navigate through the computer.

I hope you have a wonderful week off from school. I do not have any plans so I will be cleaning the house and relaxing with my family! See you in a week!