September 11, 2006

Dear Parents,

  We have completed our second week of school and all seems to have gone quite well. We began our language skills with recognizing a sentence and putting groups of words into sentences. We learned what nouns and verbs are and used them to make short sentences. Then we stretched our sentences to include descriptive words.

  This was carried over into writing process when we wrote our first story titled The Boat Ride. The children made up some pretty terrific stories by making a web of their ideas to use and putting these into their stories.

  Our first unit this year is on nursery rhymes. I have found in the past that some children don't know many nursery rhymes. I am incorporating phonic, language, and math into the learning of some of the better known rhymes. Later we will be making our own rhymes, forming a bulletin board of the characters studied, and writing stories about some characters that the children choose.

  I have been reading with small groups so that I can best fit the children into ability groups. Each group has begun reading a book and I will be adjusting groups during the year as they progress. Homework reading has also started. On the first day of each week I will send home the reading sheet for you or your child to fill in the name of the book read and how many minutes read each night. I would like to have them read 15 minutes per night from books that are on their level. Worksheets are to be filled in and signed by a parent and returned on the following Monday.

  We are practicing simple math facts by working with the facts for a few minutes and then trying to do these facts in a 1 minute session. Each time we do this, we try to beat our previous score of how many completed. These sessions help to learn the facts so the children don't have to use fingers to get the answer or just sit and memorize them. It tends to be a more fun way to master these facts.

  I am sending a separate paper to explain the Sitton Spelling program to you. I don't ask for a lot of time to be spent on homework but I do expect the reading and spelling to be done each night. Each child has a homework folder to transport work to and from home each day. If the work is returned to the folder after completion and put into the backpack, it should make its way to me each morning. This is important in getting the students to assume responsibility for their work.

Please contact me any time with questions or concerns.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Elliott