Week of: October 5 th – October 8 th News to Know COMMUNICATION: In an effort to improve my teacher to parent communication, I am going to put together a schedule in which I will attempt to call each family individually each month. These phone calls will give us a chance to briefly catch up. CONFERENCES: I am still waiting for a couple responses from parents to finalize my conference schedule. However I hope to send home a conference notification early this week with the date and time of your conference with me. BOOK FAIR: During the week of conferences, the auditorium will be transformed into the Scholastic Book Fair. Gift certificates are available along with teacher wish lists and flexible hours to accommodate the busy conference week. PTO MEETING: This Wednesday there will be a PTO meeting from 8:15-9:45. This meeting will be very informative as Mr. McCauley will talk about Common Core math, Andrea Rossi will speak about the District 97 food policy and health issues and Dr. Kelley will be in attendance and available for questions. Rowdy Readers STANDARDS: We continued working on characters, setting and major events this week in our many stories that we read. We also worked on rhymes, authors, illustrators and retelling a story. Some of the books that helped us with these tasks were: The Picnic at Apple Park The Rabbit and the Coyote The Squeaky Old Bed Chester’s Way Chrysanthemum (again) We also heard some great books our Mystery Readers. Thank you to Indrani for visiting our classroom! SIGHT WORDS: We added the new sight word “the” this week. We used it in our journals and found it in many texts. Our sight word list is now up to 5: “I”, “can”, “am” “we” and “the”. We will continue adding about 1 word per week. LETTERS and SOUNDS: This week we really concentrated on the short /a/ sound. We did a number on phonemic awareness lessons to find this sound in the beginning and in the middle of words. Math Madness Last week during our math lessons, activities and centers we worked primarily on number writing and quantity matching. We used a handwriting strategy called “Wet, Dry, Try” to form numbers. Students were also introduced to their handwriting journals and we started a Math Book in which we worked on ten frames. Upcoming Dates Wednesday, October 14 th : PTO 8:15 10/20-10/22: Parent/Teacher Conferences 10/22 and 10/23: Half days 11:00) Monday, October 26 th : Mr. Dolan ABSENT! Friday, October 30 th : Fall Parade and Party Saturday, October 31 st : Daylight Savings (fall back) Get to Know Your Child’s Teacher Meet Mrs. Dolan! Emilie and Mike have been together for over about eight years and married for just over three years. They met while attending Augustana College during their junior year. Both Emilie and Mike are in their fifth year of teaching, Emilie teaches first grade at Beye Elementary in Oak Park. The couple loves to travel, attend Chicago sports games, find new great restaurants, spend time with family/friends and go on long walks with the dog, Penny.