October 15-19, 2012

Hello Room 4 Families!
It's hard to believe we are starting the seventh week of school! Your kids have been working so hard and learning so much!

Important dates:
Friday, October 26th: free dress day/picture day/pumpkin patch field trip. We will take our pictures and then head to the pumpkin patch at 9.
Saturday, October 27: Harvest Festival, 3-8pm
Wednesday, October 31: Orange and Black Spirit Day. NO costumes please!
Thursday, November 8-Friday, November 16th: Parent/Teacher conferences and shortened days. Dismissal will be at 12:20 on these days.
Language Arts:
Our Shadows unit is going well. The kids have enjoyed learning about what makes a shadow and why shadows are sometimes long and sometimes short.  Students can bring in pictures they take or draw of shadows, books about shadows, or other things they can think of pertaining to shadows to share with the class and post on our concept and question board.
New high frequency words: he and she
This week we will focus on writing the letters Ss, Tt, Uu, and Vv. We will also keep practicing writing first and last names that begin with a capital letter and have all lower case letters after that. Please have your child practice this way at home.
We are practicing beginning sentences with capital letters.
We are also learning about what makes a sentence and how to tell the difference between complete and incomplete sentences. They have learned that sentences have two parts: 1) a naming part (subject or noun) and 2) a telling or action part (predicate or verb). So far we are using very simple sentences to practice this, like "The dog barks."
We are also starting to learn about different end marks on complete sentences, so you can reinforce this by finding periods, question marks, and exclamation marks when you are reading together.

Math: This week we are continuing to work on chapter 3, Patterns.
New vocabulary: pattern
The kids did a great job with this last week, and we are going to review and reinforce last week's objectives this week.
Objectives for this week are to copy and extend AB, AAB, ABB, and ABC color, shape, and size patterns.

Field Trip:
Our first field trip will be this month! We are going to Dave's Pumpkin Patch in West Sacramento on Friday, October 26th. The cost for this trip is $5.50 per student. This pays for a hayride, a corn maze, a small pumpkin, and an activity book. Please send cash to school as soon as possible. We will leave school at 9 am and return around 12.
Any parents who have been fingerprinted and would like to accompany us on this trip, we would love to have you! Please let me know as soon as possible.


Thanks again, parents for everything you do!
If you have any questions please email me. carrie-relles@scusd.edu