January

• No School: January 1-2

• School Resumes: January 5

• No School: January 16 for staff development 

• No School: January 19 in observance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

• End of 2nd Quarter: January 15

Please check your child’s pencil pouch. Many students are in need of fresh supplies. Some students are borrowing from the classroom supply on a daily basis, which indicates they need their own items. Check especially for pencils and red pens. Remind your children to be respectful of their supplies. Also be sure that papers in your child’s take home folder are emptied each night. It can be difficult for students to locate assignments due each day with corrected papers still in the folder. Thank you!

Also, please remember to mark all of the winter clothing with your
student’s name.  Black snow pants easily get mixed up. Thanks for sending along chap sticks, extra socks, and hand lotion for your
students.

We will begin our Human Body Systems unit in January. Students will learn about hearing, visions, the muscular and skeletal system, the nervous system, and about how the body systems work together. 

We will begin our study the Exploration of North America including the Spanish explorers Ponce de Leon, Coronado, and Hernando de Soto this month. The students will be learning about European explorers that went looking for things such as a shortcut to the East Indies, a Fountain of Youth, and cities made of gold. Instead, they found the West Indies, Florida, the Mississippi River, the Grand Canyon, the Hudson River, and the Great Lakes. We will discover how important the St. Lawrence River was to the travels of Henry Hudson.

We are back to Reading Mastery 3 and are moving right along in our new textbooks starting with Lesson 61. Every night your child should read all of the that day’s story with you. The nightly reading should take about 15 minutes with you sitting next to your child and making sure that they are pointing and allowing you to notice if they misread a word. This will better prepare them for class rather than rereading the lesson they did that day at school. 

It is so nice to see how the students have become more diligent at completing their homework each day and making the effort to improve their spelling. The students are working on writing main idea sentences that need to include who, what, where and when. Thank you for the time you spend reading with your children each evening.  This will pay huge dividends in their reading fluency and comprehension.

It is very wonderful  to see how these students have improved on their addition facts. So the current challenge is subtraction since their last subtraction test did not prove to indicate that they knew these facts well. Please practice these facts regularly with your children as this is so key to their success in math. Students should be studying both addition and
subtraction facts as well as 0, 1, 2, 5, 4, 7, 10s for multiplication.

The Saxon 5/4 students impress me with their work ethic. Students should be practicing their math facts a little each night. We have moved into multiplication and division. If you are looking for ways to assist your student at home with homework, checking that your child has a label along with the answer when necessary is a great way to help. Most homework points lost are due to missing labels.

Students will learn body parts, review singular and plural. Students will review the gender of words, and will practice adjective agreement. Students will practice with the word "tener."