Winter Gear and Storage!

Hi Families,
Well, it looks like winter weather is truly here!  Today we were trying to help students hang up everything in their lockers/cubbies after recess.  There is one locker available per student for storing all their gear! Organization is always a bit tricky, but we're up to the challenge!

Basically, your child needs:  one pair of boots, one pair of snowpants, one jacket, a warm hat and mittens/gloves as well as indoor shoes for each day.  Extra socks or pants can be helpful for really wet days. If you can help your child decide what he/she really needs here at EMES, that would be great as some kids had multiple boots, shoes, etc. that there is just not space for.  We know this transition to winter always takes a bit of time for all of us, but any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated!

In other news, we are always grateful that many families think of teachers around the holidays with thoughtful gifts, this is certainly not expected nor necessary.  We truly appreciate kind gestures. However, in conjunction with our year long theme of kindness, if you were thinking of a teacher gift, we would like to request a different option.  If you'd like to donate to our Chex Mix project in lieu of teacher gifts that would be a wonderful gesture and one we'd greatly appreciate.

We wish all of  our students and their families a wonderful Thanksgiving break! We hope you'll be able to spend it with family and friends, safe travels to those of you who will be venturing away from home.

December Kindness Project Preparation!

CHEX MIX KINDNESS PROJECT

Second and Third Grade Community Service Project

For many years the students in our classes have completed a community service project during the holidays.  The project is THE WORLD newspaper’s “SANTA PROJECT”.  This project collects money and buys new coats, hats, boots, and mittens for Central Vermont children.  This year, we will once again, make and sell “Chex Mix” as a fundraiser for this project.  We will make the mix on Thursday, December 15th and sell it on Friday, December 16th to students, staff and families of EMES.  The cost will be $1.00 per bag.

In order for this project to be a success we are asking families for donations of mix supplies.  It is truly amazing and fun for the kids to see all the great contributions we receive each year.  We need many, many boxes of cereal; it can be Chex or a generic variety, it doesn’t matter the brand!  We cannot accept any nuts or products that contain any honey-nut ingredients.  Please check ingredients before sending in contributions, pretzels can be especially tricky!  Following is a list of types of cereals, etc. we can use:

• Wheat Chex                              Goldfish style crackers
• Corn chex                                  Cheez-it style crackers
• Rice chex                                  Small pretzels-check labels!
• Cheerios (no honey nut)             Mini melba toast   

                

We will supply the spices, butter and baggies for the project.  Please send in your donations by Wednesday, December 14th so we can plan accordingly.

Thank you for your generosity in this important event.  We know how expensive groceries are, so we really appreciate your help in teaching this important lesson of giving to our students.

Please don’t hesitate to call or e-mail us with any questions!  If you can help bake or bag the mix the afternoon of Thursday,December 15h, please let your child’s teacher know.  THANK YOU!!

Friday Folders...on Monday! Election Day! Tissues Needed! Sharing Review! Gift wrap order?

Mrs. Christy's apology...Friday Folders were all packed and ready to go on Friday, but they spent tht weekend on our counter!  They are making their way home today.

As we all know, tomorrow is a big day in Vermont and the USA.  Election Day has finally arrived! In celebration of this day, students will be able to participate in a mock election here at school. Students will be able to sign in as "registered voters" and vote for both national and state officials.  In the spirit of the election, we invite students to dress in red, white and blue tomorrow if they wish.

Cold  season is definitely here and we've gone through an abundance of boxes of classroom tissues we personally purchased.  If you'd like to send in a box or two of tissues to support our classroom through cold and flu season, they would be greatly appreciated by students. Tender noses appreciate tissues that are a bit softer than what we might acquire here at school.

This afternoon we reviewed sharing for this week.  Students need to choose a book he/she has read and complete the November Book Share-Summary Sheet which is linked.  Students who said they did not have a copy, were given another one to bring home today.

Finally, we have a mystery package of wrapping paper that was  purchased from the PTNO gift wrap sale.  It had our class information on it, but not the name of the student who sold it.  The order contains two rolls of gift wrap.  One roll has snowmen, the other reindeer.  A bottle of very intersing disappearing ink is also in the package.  Please let us know if this order belongs to you and we'll make sure it goes home with your child.

This Week in CC-3

We've had a busy and productive week here in CC-3!  We hope your child shared with you all about our special "Day in the Dark" celebration on Monday.  It was a great day of learning and celebration.  We were so proud of all of our students and their ability to get a lot accomplished as well as have some fun at the same time.  It is crazy to think that the first quarter of the academic year concludes this week!  We've completed a lot of projects recently and are moving on with exciting new units of study.  Below is an academic update.

Kindness Projects
Our kindness projects of the year continue with great success!  This week CC-3 students carried out our Trick-Or-Treat for UNICEF project.  Students collected and counted all the money submitted by EMES students.  We are happy to report that the EMES community donation to UNICEF was a little over $400!  A few donations are still trickling in, we will let you know our grand total soon.  Our students separated all of the coins, counted them, and rolled them.  We were able to get in a lot of practice counting coins this week in math.

Literacy
We've recently concluded our first reading and writing units of the year.  It has been exciting to see students develop wonderful reading and writing habits over the course of the past two months.  Now it's time to set new goals and conquer new heights!

Today, we launched our new reading unit.  It's all about MYSTERIES!  Throughout this unit students will be introduced to the "big" ideas of the mystery genre while working on the important foundational skills of  story elements, predicting, envisioning, retelling, summarizing and analyzing author's craft.  Before you know it, your child will be devouring many popular mystery series!  We will also begin writing more about our reading with the important goal of finding evidence to support ideas and theories.

Please encourage your child to transport books they are reading between home and school.  We want students moving through chapter books.  The best way to do this is to read the same text at home and school.  Remember, your child should be reading independently for a minimum of 20 minutes each night!  We have an easy process for signing out books to borrow in our classroom that all students know.

In writing class, we'll be working on several skills during the next three weeks before we move on to our informational writing unit in early December.  Our skill work will include: spelling instruction, sentence structure, grammar, punctuation and parts of speech.

Math
We have been spending a lot of time on solving word problems that include repeated addition.  Many of these problems have multiple steps to solve.  When given a word problem, students are working on reading the problem and determining what is the important information, what operation(s) to use, what strategy would work best, and labeling their solution.

This week we began to investigate equal groups.  This will lead us into our work with arrays and area. These are all models of multiplication.  Kids are always so excited to learn their multiplication facts.  Well, third grade is their year!


Discovery
As we all know, the election is next Tuesday!  In class we've been learning a bit about the election process.  We continue our study of the United States, its symbols and landmarks.  Students are working in partnerships to research  a specific national symbol or landmark.  They will then share their learning with others.  Teams are working on learning about the following:

• The Bald Eagle
• Liberty Bell
• White House
• The Great Seal
• The American Flag
• Statue of Liberty

Technology Integration
This week we began a new project with Ms. Arlyn.  We'll be using a program on iPads called   as a story retelling tool.  We're working on reading picture books, creating a written summary for the text, building scenes with Legos and inputting it all into the program.  We'll be working on this project for the next several weeks.  It was incredibly exciting to see partnerships go to work this week and demonstrate successful collaboration skills.

We look forward to meeting with families next week for conferences.  We've got a busy Thursday afternoon/evening scheduled as well as Friday appointments.  You should have received both a hard copy (bright orange) confirmation notice as well as an email.  If you do not know when your conference is, please let us know, we'll confirm your time.  We're excited to share your child's progress with you and set new goals for the future. Have a great weekend!

Tidbits

• New book orders are due on Thursday, November 10th.
• Indoor and outdoor shoes are needed each day!
• No school next Friday, November 11th due to Parent Conferences!

Have a great weekend!
Christine and Kathy