Newsletter

Hi,

We had a wonderful visit with our pen pals on Friday. We even got interviewed by a reporter from the Austin American Statesman. The story of our pen pal program should run the week of Thanksgiving! Look for it!

Don't forget to turn in your art work forms by Friday. Your child's artwork can be turned into beautiful gifts for the holidays.

Please turn in your book order form ASAP. This is for our class book. We will be creating poetry and artwork with photos of our pen pals. Each of the students will be creating a page for the book. If you don't want to purchase a book, send back the form with the "no" checked so that we can receive a free book for our classroom.

Harvest Festival-Friday, October 29, 2010
This Friday is our school's Harvest Festival. There will be lots of games, activities, and fun. Come join us!

UNICEF-Our class and our school will be collecting money for UNICEF. Your child will come home with an orange UNICEF box. You are not required to collect at all. We learned about some of the difficulties that children from around the world encounter daily. We read a magazine article and read some books to give us information. We also will look at the UNICEF website to gain more information. Many children don't have clean drinking water, nutrious foods, or medicine. Some children have to work for their families and don't get to go to school at all. UNICEF helps the children around the world. Our school goal is $500. The Forest Creek Service Club will have a table set up at the Harvest Festival to give information and collect donations. Thank you for your support and for helping your child realize that they can make a difference in the world.

Reading-We have been learning about text structures in expository text. Non-fiction text can be organized by comparing and contrasting information, sequencing the information chronologically, or discussing the causes and effects of the information. We read articles and decided which format was used. We are learning more about poetry this week.

Writing-We worked on writing poems and finished them today. They turned out very well. We will put them in the hallway for everyone to enjoy. We started collecting some entries for our next narrative by thinking about family stories and strong emotions. We are going to work on our class book the rest of this week then continue with personal narratives.

Math-Input/output charts have been interesting. We used these to learn a little about algebra. We also continued to work on multiplication and patterns. This week we are working on probability and statistics.

Science-We learned about changes in matter by adding or taking away heat or energy. We used several experiments and to show matter changing. We will continue this week with solutions and mixtures.

PTA Donations-Yeah! No selling wrapping paper! Please help our school by donating to our PTA. The class with the highest donations will get a class party. We are in the running. Keep sending in those donations!

Red Ribbon Week-We have been learning about making good choices and staying healthy. We read about drugs in our health books and wrote essays for the school essay contest. We will continue learning more about this topic during this week.

Thank you for sharing your child with me! I learned a lot at my training last week but missed the kids! I was very happy to be back!

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.
Sincerely,
Pam Bartholomew