April 24, 2009

Upcoming Dates

* Monday, April 27th: If You Give a Pig a Pancake Field Trip
We will be going to the Flint Center on Monday. Mr. Feve (Emilie’s father) will be coming with our class. We will return by lunchtime to Eaton.

* Friday, May 1st: Scholastic Book Orders Due
Please write ONE check payable to Scholastic Book Clubs if you are interested in purchasing books from the May catalogs.

* Friday, May 8th: First Grade Musical - 2:00pm in the MP Room
On Monday, I will be sending home a costume list for your child. Please bring the clothes in a bag labeled with his/her name by the following Monday, May 4th. We will be keeping the clothes at school to ensure that everyone has their outfit on the musical day. They will take their clothes home on Friday.

* Monday, May 18th: San Francisco Zoo Field Trip
Attached to today’s newsletter is a permission slip for the SF zoo. Please sign and return the form by next Friday. We are able to take 3 parent chaperones, who will be in charge of a group of students to explore the zoo together during the day.

* Thursday, May 21st: Intent to Return form due
Don’t forget to return this form! It asks you to share whether or not your child will be returning to Cupertino during the next school year. Please fill it out as soon as you can!

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Dear Families,

Welcome back from vacation! I hope you had a great time last week. I spent most of the week taking care of errands, cleaning the house, and spending time with family and friends.

Here are some highlights from the week:
Star of the Week: Maya
Poem of the Week: Little Seeds We Sow in Spring
Song of the Week: The 50 States that Rhyme
Kindness is … taking care of our environment.
Word Wall: carry, kind, put, saw, butter, were, work, person
Next Week’s Sharing: Regular – something from another country
(at least 4 sentences memorized and picture/object to show)

• Language Arts: Theme 8 Our Earth – Week 3
• Strategy and Skill Focus: Predict/Infer, Conclusions
• Word Families: words that end with –ed and -ing
• Sounds: -ed and –ing words
• Grammar: Action words with -ed

• Math: We are continuing our chapter on time and calendars. We have been practicing reading and writing the time by hour and half hour. We read a story called Time To… and also completed a personal book describing different activities we do during the day. This helped us to practice drawing the time on clocks. We also learned about elapsed time and completed word problems together. Students practiced problems with the following equation: start time + how long (hours) = end time.

• Writing: We worked on Writer’s Workshop this week and some students are making really good progress. They are really practicing the skill of working independently and proofreading their own work.

• Science: We have moved on for learning about Air to learning about Weather. This week, we began pretending to be meteorologists and learned how to describe the weather each day. We learned vocabulary to describe the cloud cover (sunny, partly cloudy, overcast, or foggy), the precipitation (rainy, snowy, hail, or no precipitation), the wind (no wind, some wind, or strong wind), and the temperature (Fahrenheit). We made our own thermometers and practiced how to graph the temperature each day! It reached the 90’s this week!

• Social Studies: On Wednesday, it was Earth Day. To celebrate, we had an assembly called “Ocean Commotion” where we sang songs about animals and things in the ocean. We also talked about how we help the earth and our environment. Thanks for those of you who participated in the District Walk-to-School day and walked to school on Earth Day to help our environment!

• Computer: We continued illustrating and writing our adaptations of the story, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. A few more weeks to go!

• Music: We are working really hard on our musical, which is in 2 weeks! Not only have we been practicing the songs, but now we are learning dances too! Please plan on attending May 8th!

• Free the Children Fundraiser: Thank you to those students who have already donated money to this fundraiser. One option that was given by the Student Council was that students are encouraged to do chores around the house to raise money to donate (for example, maybe they can earn 50 cents for helping in the garden). Also, they will be collecting used books in the next 2 weeks to donate as well.

Room 8 has traffic duty next week! All the classes at Eaton have an assigned week to help out our school bus circle, and next week is our turn! I placed a sign up sheet outside of our classroom. If you have not signed up yet, please look at the list and try to sign up one day (Monday – Friday). We need at least one parent volunteer for the Suisun parking lot 20 minutes before school (8:45-9:05am) and also 20 minutes after school (3:00-3:20pm) each day, so please help if you can! Thank you!