Bartholomew Bats!


Our school is located in Round Rock, Texas which is near Austin. Austin and Round Rock both have huge populations of Mexican Free Tailed Bats that live under our bridges. A colony of bats lives beneath the Ann Richards/Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin and in Round Rock, another colony resides under the Interstate 35 bridge over McNeil Road. Each evening from March to about October, the bats fly out from beneath the bridge and search for insects to eat. The emergence of the bats is a wonder to watch. We are also thankful that all these millions of bats eat the bugs by our homes.

Our class mascot is the Bat to honor the mammals that live so close to us and help us. (also because Bat and Bartholomew both start with the letter B!) The bats in Central Texas live together in a group and help take care of the young. Then they migrate together as a team. Our class will also live together in our classroom, work together as a team, and help each other out. We are the Bartholomew Bats!





Saturday, January 10, 2015

Newsletter

Hi,

We had a great first week of 2015! It was wonderful to see everyone and hear all about the break. The weather has been a little crazy. Stay warm!

Walk to Read for Libraries of Love
Our school is participating in a Walk to Read Event on MLK Day January 19. Come to school at 2:00 and we will have a short presentation and then go to the track to walk. We will stop and read our hard back book then walk a bit more before donating the books to build libraries in Uganda, Africa. All friends and family are welcome to the walk. Monetary donations and more gently used or new hard back books are being accepted. We hope you can make it!

Author Visit on Friday, January 23
Kate Klise is coming to do a writing workshop with our fourth graders. Order forms for her books came home on Friday. All books purchased will be autographed by Kate Klise. Read more about her at http://www.kateandsarahklise.com/. It's going to be great!

Reading-We are reading traditional tales and determining the theme with text evidence.We are also examining characters and the way they change, feel, act, as well as their relationships with others. We wrote about characteristics of fairy tales like beginning with Once Upon a Time and ending with Happily Ever After, magic, royalty, good vs. evil, groups of 3 and 7, etc... We compared and contrasted Cinderella stories from around the world. We read a story within a story called Once Upon a Cool Motorcycle Dude and discussed it in literature circles. We will continue next week reading some fables, tall tales, trickster tales. We will also begin learning more about Civil Rights and begin reading novels and discussing them literature circles.

Writing-We are continuing to work with conventions using mentor sentences and will continue to work on revising and editing. We will be writing more personal narratives and work on improving them. We will also write some fantasy stories or fractured fairy tales.

Social Studies-We finished learning about explorers in Texas and are beginning to study missions, presidios, and early towns.

Dates to Remember:
Monday, January 12-Reading Log due, No Tutorials due to a district meeting
Tuesday, January 13-Tutorials from 2:45-3:45, PTA Meeting
Wednesday, January 14-Reading Response and Summary due
Thursday, January 15-Service Club meeting 2:45-3:45
Friday, January 16-Reading Response and Summary due, Spelling and Vocabulary tests
Monday, January 19-No school, MLK Day, Walk to Read Event for Libraries of Love at 2 pm at FCE-bring a hard cover book and your donation envelopes

Have a wonderful weekend! Let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Sincerely,
Pam
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