February 11, 2011

Dear Families,

Thank you thank you thank you! What a special week! I really felt appreciated and was so touched by all the surprises each day. Thank you for thinking of me and being so generous with the flowers, cards, gifts, books, food, etc. I can tell a lot of you put so much thought into your gifts and made it a very personal gesture. Another huge contribution was taking all of the teachers’ recess duties!!! Those extra 20 minutes are incredible, I can’t even explain. Teachers have this strange life where we are ruled by bells and schedules, and even finding time to eat or go to the restroom is a challenge. Thank you for volunteering to cover our recess duties and then providing treats for us each day in the staff room! Also, if you were involved in any of the planning or preparing the lunch for the teachers, thank you for your time and hard work as well! The teachers all feel very special and it really made this week wonderful! So wonderful.

Here are some highlights for the week:
• Next Week’s Sharing: Something that you love.
Try to be creative and find something unique to share about. Remember to prepare at least 4 complete sentences about the object or sharing (not including the introduction).

• Letter of the Week: K
(You can see our computer center drawings in the “Classwork” section of our website.)

• Story of the Week: If You Were a Penguin

• Writing: We wrote in our journals this week about something we wish we had 100 of. Students wrote a sentence and drew a picture to illustrate their thoughts.

• Science: We continued learning more facts about penguins, and we read a National Geographic Kids book about the 17 different kinds of penguins. Then, we learned how to write a short paragraph using three facts we knew about penguins. We learned about a rough draft and a final draft. We put our writing together into a penguin project. Students are remembering to stay in the lines when they write, use spaces between words, and identify sentences by using a capital and period.

• Book Fair next Wednesday: Next week, we will not have computer lab because there is a special 5th grade book fair to raise money for science camp, that we are scheduled to visit at the same time. If you want, your child can bring in a few dollars and buy some books next Wednesday. Please just make sure they have it in a safe place and are responsible to carry the money!

• Computer Lab: Since there is no computer lab next week, this week we illustrated our Valentine poem for February. We made a tree of hearts using stamps in Kidpix, and you can see these projects on our website under “Classwork.”

• Social Studies: Since President’s Day is coming up, we have been continuing to learn about the different presidents. We are learning a song to teach us some of the names of the presidents and we also read more books about the different presidents.

• Math: Now we are mixing up our addition and subtraction problems, and practicing how to show the problems using pictures. Please practice this at home! There is a lot of confusion when we switch back and forth from subtraction and back to addition. We will be taking our test next week.

• Art: We saw Mrs. Abada on Thursday and continued our clay projects from last month. Mrs. Abada put our clay birds and nests into the kiln so that they were hardened. Yesterday, we used glaze to paint our nests brown and our birds yellow or blue. Mrs. Abada will be putting our bird nests into the kiln one more time. Mrs. Abada also let us see the kiln and see how it was different than a regular oven. We are excited to see the final project!

If you haven’t seen the “Photos” section of our website yet, I have posted pictures of our classroom decorations for the month of February. Also, in today’s Friday Folder, there is a “Golden Ticket” for next week’s “Great Schools Week.” Remember this is a huge fundraising opportunity to try and save class sizes, especially for your kids next year in first grade. Last year’s Golden Ticket was very successful and raised a lot of money. Make sure to bring the paper with you to all of the restaurants and services in order to get the donation for Cupertino. Please join us and help to raise money for our kids!