Hello! I hope your first fall weekend was enjoyable. It's been a fast but busy week! I would like to thank Skylar's grandmother, Liz Hebert, for trying to get more monarch caterpillars for us to observe. It turns out that the caterpillars she found on her dill plants often fool people into believing that they are monarch butterfly larvae, when they are, in fact, Eastern Swallowtail caterpillars. The biggest identifying difference is that the Eastern Swallowtail caterpillars are lacking the notable front (AND BACK!!!) antennae easily seen on the monarch caterpillars. Thank you SO MUCH for trying to help us out! As it happened, Judy Coolidge, a friend and former teacher here at CPS was able to bring in three more monarch caterpillars for us! The first of the three, which we named "Zoe" went into its "J" Thursday morning at 5:30am (yes, I was there to witness!), and split its skin to show the chrysalis beneath while the children were working that afternoon! It seemed as though one minute it was still hanging in the "J", and the next minute there was a gleaming green chrysalis. It WAS kind of cool that we could see the wrinkled skin on the "floor" of the container, though. Its companions, "Baby Boo" and "Sky" , were in their own chrysalises during the school day on Friday. "Flapster" emerged from HIS chrysalis on Thursday afternoon (another quick happening that we JUST missed), but we did get the chance to see his crumpled wings as he removed his back feet from the now clear chrysalis! He is a boy! Ask your child how we know that! We released him on Friday morning, once he had a chance to dry out and build his strength on flower nectar so he could start on his long journey to Mexico (and I don't mean Mexico, Maine!) He was pretty calm and mellow, so the children who wanted to do so were able to hold him on their finger. We left him on a flower in "Celina's Garden", in the hopes that he would feed before leaving Bethel. We had a beautiful day to set him free! Pictures of the "release" were taken, and later sent to the newspaper, so be sure to see if they appear in The Bethel Citizen sometime within the next few weeks. I also sent copies to the office, so they should appear on the screen above the library doorway at CPS, too.
We had our first NWEA test Thursday morning. The children, for the most part, approached it rather calmly. Thank you for talking to them about the testing, and helping them not to be nervous about it. Most of them focused fairly well on the "mission" at hand; I did have to draw a few of them back on task several times as they got distracted by things around them. Our last fall NWEA test will take place next Thursday afternoon from 12:15 - 1:15. It is a Reading test. The results of both of these tests will be shared with you at the Fall Parent-Teacher conference. If your child took the NWEA testing last spring, our talk will incorporate information from that test session, as well. I do not currently have the dates for those conferences, though they usually happen during the first full week in November.
Our "Lockdown" drill went very well, considering that we barely had time to get back to the classroom from the NWEA before it occurred. I did not mention it to the children until after our test session was over, so I had JUST finished explaining that a DRILL would happen today when it did. The kids were great about going into hiding while I secured the room. I thought they would probably miss snack (due to the timing of the drill) so I let them quietly munch on gingerbread cookies while we huddled together in the dark. Of course, it was exciting and scary at the same time, but the kids did a great job of staying calm and quiet, which are the two biggest requirements of the drill. We took some time, after lockdown was over, to talk about what happened, and what MIGHT happen if it were real. It is my understanding that we will be practicing "Lock down" once a month for the foreseeable future, and that we will, at some point, also be experiencing a "controlled evacuation" by bus at one of these "lock downs". Then, we took an extra recess to get the stiffness out of our cramped limbs!
Thursday's take home booklet completed our fairy tale readers for the year. Next week, your child will continue to bring home the book he or she read in reading group that day. It is now time for him or her to be reading to you each evening, Monday through Thursday. Please be sure to return these books in your child's folder each morning, as our number of copies of each book is somewhat limited, and the books need to be read by others. It is still my expectation that your child practice his or her sight words AND his or her fluency strips each evening. Those children who are able to read the 10 of the12 fluency strips to me on Friday receive NEW strips the next Monday. Those who can read 9 or fewer of the strips received the SAME strips to practice for another week. The "certificate" that comes home each Friday tells you how many sight words your child knew, what words (if any) he or she didn't know, and how many fluency strips your child was able to read. Since these scores will impact your child's "grade" on his or her report card, I want you to know how he or she is doing each week. In that way, the score on the report card comes as no surprise.
We took the "hands on" assessment on patterning on Thursday afternoon, where your child was told pattern sequences, and had to build them using unifix cubes. Everyone passed the AB, AAB, ABB, ABC, and ABCD patterns!! There will be one more district assessment on "patterning" which the children will take this coming week. That one involves coloring AND LABELING patterns on six or seven "block trains", and is a paper task. Assuming everyone passes that one, too, it will mean that we are done with patterning for now, and will only revisit it when "skip counting". In two weeks, your child will need to be able to his or her knowledge of the sequence of days of the weeks and the months of the year. At the end of October, he or she will be able to demonstrate his or her knowledge of how a calendar works by finding the MONTH, the YEAR, a particular "date box", and show me what a week looks like on a simulated calendar page. We have been practicing all of these skills when we do "calendar" together each day, but it wouldn't hurt to have practice on these same skills at home if you can find a few minutes here or there. We have begun to look at the many ways numbers are represented (numeral, number words, tally marks, coins, ten frames), including "number bonds" (two smaller numbers that, when put together, will give the "target number". This quite naturally leads us into the study of addition. Addition becomes our target math skill for the first three weeks in October, with subtraction being introduces on Halloween week.
We have finished our Social Studies unit on "citizenship", and are moving on to our Science unit of the Five Senses next week. During October and November we will work on mapping skills for Social Studies, and a cursory examination of the six major systems of the Human Body in Science--the nervous system, the muscular system, the skeletal system (during Halloween week, of course!), the respiratory system, the circulatory system, and the digestive system. We leave the reproductive system for an older grade, but do talk briefly about reproduction as part of the human life cycle. No "how are babies made" details are given at this grade level--we do talk about women's bodies being the ones where babies develop, and we do talk about birth (and death, for that matter) as being a natural part of the human life cycle. During the weeks leading up to the Christmas Break, we will investigate and share "holiday traditions" we follow in our own families, so be anticipating that.
Finally, we have scheduled a field trip to Harvest Hill for October 21st. We will get to Pumkinland, have a snack and bathroom break, have a demonstration/presentation of the life cycles of pumpkins and corn, and will get to go pick out a pumpkin and receive some popping corn corncobs. Then we will have a picnic lunch, and go visit the "petting zoo" and the animals in the barn (I'll stay outside, as hay triggers asthma attacks for me), and then go play on some of the equipment and slide on the FRANKENSLIDE! We expect to leave there by 1pm, and return to school before buses. The cost to each child (and each chaperone) is $5.00 per person. Parents who wish to chaperone on this field trip must be approved by the district (they will do a background and reference check) in order to accompany us. You will have to provide your own transportation (or car-pool with someone else who is going). Children must travel ON THE SCHOOL BUS to the activity, but may accompany their parent (or designated adult) home after the activity. The details will be coming home on a permission slip in early October, but I wanted to give you a "heads up" to be able to give "work" advanced notice (and to go through the chaperoning background/reference check process) if you wish to accompany us on this trip.
There are no "special events" scheduled for this upcoming week.
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