Monday, January 31, 2011

SPECIAL REQUEST for indoor recess...

These cold winter days mean indoor recess. While I have lots of games and things for the children to do during indoor recess, it would be nice to have some legos in the classroom for them to play with.
If you have legos at home that are not being used, please consider donating them to our class for indoor recess fun!
Thanks a million.

Newsletter 1/31

Mrs. Bzura’s News . .
1/31/11


The St. Pius School Community, strives to follow Jesus as we Study, Pray, and Serve.

**Mrs. Ocacio is looking for volunteers to work at the 3rd grade “game” on Carnival night. Please call or email her to schedule your time. 313/550-3151, (cell)734/282-2850 or mocacio@yahoo.com

Reading: It was great to see the connections the children were making as they read Shadows of the Cloud World this week. Many of the mysteries of the past 6 books were solved in this book, and yet it leaves us wondering what will happen in the next book.
This week, some children will again be going to Mrs. Bilinski for a reading group. It’s great to be able to split into smaller groups! Mrs. Bilinski’s group will tackle the book called Mascot’s Message from the Tales of Adventure series.
My group will read book 8 from Tales of Mystery, called Conflict in the Clouds. This particular book will push them at times to read at a 5th grade reading level!
Both groups will work on retelling the story after each chapter. We’ll also revisit the phonics concepts of the “walkers”, suffixes, and syllables.

Writing/English: We’ll take the skills we’ve learned with adjectives and adverbs and begin writing “colorful” sentences with them. Then I’ll be doing a unit on writing friendly letters.

Science: We finished reading the information from Unit F, Chapter 1 this week. We’ll continue to talk about the concepts of thermal energy and heat on Monday and Tuesday. There will be a test over Chapter 1 on Thursday, February 3rd.

Religion: Monday is the test over chapter 8. Tuesday we’ll begin talking about Catholic Schools and what they do for us and for our church.
Handwriting: We continue practicing cursive writing and copying scripture this week! The children are now required to write their names in cursive and are copying their spelling words in cursive as well.

Spelling:
I am going to begin putting our spelling words in the newsletter. They come home every Monday, but the grades on the tests are falling a little. Please be sure your child is practicing at home. Our focus this week is the “walkers”. The words are: blue, glue, value, true, boat coast, road, doe, foe, hoe, poem, toe, fruit, juice, continued.

Social Studies – We began chapter 4 – “Michigan Becomes a State”. We talked about MI was not one of the original 13 colonies, and how President Washington sent General Wayne to take the MI territory from the British, finally making it a state. This week, we’ll learn more about our struggles with the British.

Upcoming Dates:
1/31 Religion Test
1/31 – Catholic School’s Week
1/31 Mass
2/1 PJ day, bagel sales & Read In
2/2 Patriotic Day
2/3 Student appreciation
day, Talent Show, Crazy
dress/hat day
2/4 Spirit Day, & PTO
assembly “Abe Lincoln”
2/3 Science Test

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Welcome back! I hope you all had a restful and blessed Christmas vacation. I know I enjoyed the time with my family here in MI as well as with my sister & her family in FL.

The third graders have come back in style and in awesome form! These past 2 days have been extremely productive and the children's behavior has been incredibly good! We started reading groups in which each group is reading a different novel. Check your child's planner to see which book he or she is reading. We went to the science lab to investigate mixtures and how to best separate them. We began our Poetry unit and will be writing our first poem this week, and we continue on with our cursive letters. The children still love this!

Please note that the end of the marking period is January 14th. Any FIX papers that have come home should be fixed and returned by that date.