Dialogue Journals

This month, the kids will have Dialogue Journaling as a part of their homework instead of book reports. Below is the explanation for how to complete a dialogue journal at home.

Dialogue Journal Objective: I can read what you write to me and write back to you.

This year one of our homework expectations is for your child to dialogue journal once a week at home with a family member. During dialogue journaling, your child is having a silent, written conversation with someone where you write back and forth to each other about any topic. We have found this activity to be a motivating reason for kids to write and read what is written to them. It’s also a great way for you to find out about their day or talk about things that are important for them. This is not necessarily a time for them to be corrected on punctuation or spelling. Often the kids will automatically use the words you’ve written to help them spell. Just enjoy the conversation with your child, ask them questions and encourage them to ask you questions as well. It might be helpful for you to keep all the entries in a notebook. The entries do not need to be turned in, just check off that your child has completed a dialogue journal on their homework checklist.

Finding Good Fit Books

At our ILP conferences we always have lots of people ask how to find good fit books for their kids to read at home. We just found a great tool on Scholastic that can help you out! You just type in the book in the BookAlike tool and it gives you similar books in reading level. You can also change it to select books that are harder or easier than the book you type in. We hope it helps you all as you work to read at home with your kids this year!

http://bookwizard.scholastic.com/tbw/homePage.do

2nd Quarter Summative

We know our last summative has just been completed, but the date for our next summative is set! On December 8th, you and your child are invited to come between 2:00 and 3:30. Your child would like to show you their work that they completed during our Native American unit. We know that is a busy time of the year, so please mark your calendars and save that date!

Thank you for attending our Egypt Summative. The kids did a great job and we hope you enjoyed their performances and projects.

Summative tonight

Dear Parents,
Summative night has finally arrived. Remember your child may dress up in Egyptian attire or dress up nicely. There was an error in the time Ms. Aguilar's class will sing their Egypt song. Ms. Aguilar's class will sing promptly at 6:00p.m. All kids need to be in the 3/4 cluster to perform the song at their scheduled time. We look forward to seeing you tonight!

Team 1/2

This week, the 1/2 teachers will be attending a training on Tuesday and Wednesday. We will have substitutes those two days teaching in our classrooms. We will be getting trained in Thinking Maps which will help us with our instruction in all content areas! We are very excited for the opportunity.

Also, the only thing we are currently collecting at school are Box Tops for Education. Thank you for thinking of us and sending in other things, but for now, we are not collecting them.

Today, September 21st, each student brought home a gold piece of paper. On the gold piece of paper they wrote a list of things that they would like to bring to school from home. The items will be used to make projects for the Ancient Egypt summative. They should be asking for things like cardboard, toilet paper rolls, aluminum foil, gold glitter, scrap pieces of fabric, things you might have around the house. Please have a conversation with them about what the items will be used for. You can certainly send in a substitute item that you think might help them to build their project. You should not need to go out and buy anything special for this project. For example, students might bring in cereal boxes to build a step pyramid. Thank you for your support, send in the "junk."

Our Summative date has been changed to October 4th from 5:00-6:30 due to a scheduling conflict. We apologize for the inconvenience.
The kids will walk you through our Ancient Egypt Museum and you will see them perform a song about Egypt. Mrs. Sullivan's class is performing at 5:00, Mrs. Johns class at 5:30, and Miss Aguilar's class performs at 6:00. Please plan to be there for the performance for your child's homeroom and then for about 20-30 minutes before or after the performance to look at your child's projects. The kids will need to wear dress clothes or wear an Ancient Egyptian style outfit. We'll see you then!

We are working on putting together volunteer schedules and will have them out within the next week or so. Thank you for signing up!

Galileo testing will take place in our cluster on Thursday and Friday this week. Please make sure your child is well rested and eats a good breakfast.

We will have homework this week, please check your child's classes for the appropriate homework. The book report sheets can be completed on one chapter of a book if your child is working on a chapter book that they haven't finished yet.