Weekly Newsletter - January 7, 2023
Dear Parents,
Happy New Year to you all! I wish everyone a healthy, successful, and very happy 2023, and it's great to be back at Sharon after our Winter Break. The boys and girls were so happy to see each other on Tuesday, and it's so nice to get back into our daily classroom routine.
January is another "assessment month", and the boys and girls will be assessed for mid-year goals and progress to date. These assessments will be sprinkled out throughout the month, and several will be administered online during specific date CMS windows. For that reason, please let me know if your child will be absent from school, arriving late, or leaving early - so I can plan accordingly. It's always so much easier on everyone when we take assessments on days when everyone is present! Assessments will cover writing skills, sight word mastery, phonemic awareness and phonics knowledge, literacy skills, spelling, listening comprehension, vocabulary, counting skills, and our current math topic on measurement. I appreciate your help and communication!
Sharon will have a "cozy and comfortable" Read-In hour on Friday, January 16th. Students may wear their comfy and warm pajamas that day, but wear their tennis shoes because we have Health & Fitness that day. They may also bring in some of their favorite storybooks from home to read to self, and read with a friend. During our Read-In hour we'll enjoy a read aloud story and activity, students will read favorite books from home, and then we'll read on our iPads on the Kids A to Z program. It should be a fun time to focus on our favorite stories!
Remember that Monday, January 16th will be the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, so school will be closed. The next teacher workday will be Wednesday, January 25th. Class pictures will be taken on Thursday, January 26th - more information will come soon!
As we are now in our winter months, we know that inclement weather can happen at any moment. This week, your child brought home a very large manila envelope filled with "virtual classwork" across all areas of our curriculum. In the case we need to "work from home", these are the worksheets and activity sheets we will need. Please do not let your child open the envelope and complete anything. We will use these packets during our zoom meetings together. And if we all lose power, and are unable to have zoom meetings - then this is the written classwork your child will need to complete to be "counted present" and will turn in to me upon our return to school. As you can imagine the amount of paper we all used to make these packets, we did not make many extras - only a few for new students, so please put these packets in a safe place until we need them. Thanks so much for your help with this, and hopefully we will not need to use them, but if we do - we are ready!
Student technology devices are coming home more frequently during the winter time, so I have also added your child's Dreambox log-in information to the inside of their daily blue folder. Your child will enter our school code, classroom code, then the password I assigned them. Mr. Jennings and I have shown the students how to visit the Dreambox app on their iPads, so this is another option for home practice of math skills. It pairs nicely with the Kids A to Z reading app, and I can also change some of the activities the students can practice, based on the math topics we are working on in the classroom. In case the folder is not home, use the following info:
School Code: dspq/sharone
Classroom Code: 39449
Password: (ask your child the picture I assigned them) Have fun!
This week the boys and girls began writing their own weather stories in literacy, based on what we have learned about the weather, how to dress and prepare for the weather, and what activities we can do in different types of weather. Students gave their character a name, chose a specific type of weather, and now we're working on major story events in their stories. When you look at the literacy worksheets that come home, pay attention to the sentence writing on the back of the papers. This is our main focus during this grading session, as students should be able to compose their own complete thought, start the sentence with a capital letter, finger space between words, end the sentence with a period, sound out each word to spell the word, and utilize the sight words he/she should have mastered.
In Math, we are learning about how we can use attributes to measure items in our world, and use the correct vocabulary words to describe what/how we are measuring. Students are measuring the height, length, weight, and capacity of objects and describing objects we compare as longer, shorter, taller, heavy, light, more, and less. Our Science/enrichment unit of study takes us to the Arctic, where students will learn about a variety of arctic animals and the polar habitats. To kick off the New Year, students have replenished their supply boxes with new pencils, new crayons, new glue-sticks, and they are sitting at new tables.
Our Panthers ended their season with a Win against the Saints! Good for them, and let's see who gets the coaching job for next year! Coach Wilks seems to be moving the team in a positive direction! Nothing perks me up on the cold winter days, than watching the PGA golfers in Hawaii. Morikawa is going to be hard to beat today, but it sure is nice to see Zalatoris back in action and ready to get a win in 2023. The Kapalua course is a tough one, but so beautiful to watch! The College Football season comes to a close tomorrow night, and the Georgia vs. TCU match-up will be a good one. A new sports season is has begun!
Mrs. Ireland