Dear Families,

I want to wish you each a wonderful Spring Break.  I will miss the students, but know that they are excited to see family and friends over the holiday weekend and throughout next week.  For those of you traveling, be safe and create many memories.

For those who ordered the Lunch Bunch Book Club book.  Please read it over the break and we will plan to meet during lunch on Thursday, upon our return.  

We have one week left within this marking period.  The week we return is a testing week.  I'd suggest that you have your child visit DreamBox and Raz-Kids a little each day if you can.  Perhaps 20 minutes on both.  We will have a writing assessment for our Unit 4 reading theme.  The students will have a little quiz in ISM about States of Matter.  They brought home a booklet this week which they can review.  We have our big Unit 4 theme test that they will need to do alone.  Up until now, I could model it with them and read it to them.  They will be responsible to this on their own.  

Friday, April 13 is a half day of school for the students.  

Take a look at our gallery below.  We had a wonderful week!  

We had so much fun this week reading dramas.  Today, the kids were given a folktale and they had to visualize what the characters looked like.  Then, they were asked to make the them.  Finally, each group presented their folktale.  They did a fabulous job.  

I'm sure by now you heard about our violation tickets!  I was going to wait until after the break to introduce this but the students were really excited!  This is a lesson that covers economics, and cause and effect.  Every Thursday will be "PAY DAY" where I will give each student $10 dollars (excellence dollars).  If they violate our two rules of being kind or not working hard, they will be given a ticket.  At their recess time, they will need to pay the fine.  Yesterday, I paid out $270.  Today (after two days) the fines were $101!  Some children may run out of money if they continue having to pay fines.  When that does happen before their next Pay Day, they will miss recess.  No recess will be missed unless they run out of money to pay the fine.  Then, at the end of each month, I will open a small store up for shopping.  The students can still spend $10, $20, $30, $50 on Treasure Box, coupons, stuffed animals.  In addition to those choices, I will also set up higher expense items.  I found out this week that Noah has been saving every dollar so far this year, with maybe one or two small exceptions, and he has $300!  For that kind of saving, I better have a Slurpy Reward to buy or something really special!!!

​Have a wonderful weekend!

Tomorrow is wear your favorite sport/team day.  This is a school-wide spirit day.  It is also bagel day for those who ordered at the beginning of the year.  I'm going to test money and time tomorrow afternoon.  I really want to see how they are doing with these life skills.  If we have a lot of students still struggling, I will continue to reinforce the skills.  However, I really feel like the majority of the students have a great grasp of these skills.

Check out our photos and captions.  Have a great night!

We enjoyed more time on the large map this morning.  It was fun to share it with third grade.  Our class really knew a lot! They will be well prepared for next year.

A local author came to visit today.  He shared his book which was a non-fiction story about his experience as a child with his bird.  It  had a nice message about learning your phone number and address!  Please do practice those with your children.  So very important!

Morgan is in desperate need of lunch supervisors. We will happily take volunteers or this is a paid position.  If interested, please contact the office.

Several students have homework tonight!  Please be sure to help them use an online dictionary if you do not have a paper one in your home.  These are skills that are important.  They choose six of their spelling words to complete the worksheet.  We have done these before, so your child should know what to do.  If there is homework tonight, you might want to have a conversation about using their time more carefully.  They did have plenty of class time to complete the work today.

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It was a delightful day in room 23.  This week in our language arts, the genre is folktales and drama.  The essential question is how do we learn about nature?  To help the students understand what folktales are, we played a simple listening game called, Telephone!  They needed to listen carefully and try to remember what was said.  Then, they whispered it on to the next person.  We played it first with all 27 students.  Then, we broke up into two smaller teams to see if they could recall the sentence a little smoother.  They liked the game. And hopefully it helps them understand a little more about who folktales were shared.

Thank you Mrs. Nowicki for bringing in a huge map of Michigan. We had a few moment to visit it today to review our mapping skills of N, S, E, W.  We also looked at our state boarders.  We get to go back tomorrow for more.

As we continue to practice counting money and recognize them, we are also working on some graphing skills, vocabulary, telling time, and simple measurement.  

If find a few free moments, the UCS Annual Art Show is being held at Rose Kidd Elementary.  Our own school art show will be later this spring.

We have an author visit scheduled for tomorrow.  There will also be a PTO meeting tomorrow night at 6:30.

A book order came home today.  Along with new spelling words.