Happy Fall Red-tailed Hawk Families!
What an amazing start to autumn! We have been loving the recent weather. With the rain and cooler days, we’ve been able to start our outdoor garden! The students have been excited to see that many of our flowers are starting to sprout. We also have a moringa tree sapling popping up from the soil. Our small Meiwa kumquat tree will be going in the ground soon and hopefully will provide additional shade and sweet fruit by next year. Thank you again to everyone who generously donated soil to our garden!
In class the students have been busy at work! Our older students are working on the six traits of writing and recently completed their first multi-paragraph assignment. They will continue to practice the writing process, switching their focus to opinion writing. Our younger students have been refining sentence writing, focusing on the elements of complete sentences, as well as sentence conventions. Most recently they have begun working with apostrophe usage. Meanwhile our youngest friends continue to work on correct letter formation, and sentence construction using targeted vocabulary and key words. Additionally, we are working with perimeter of rectangles, multiples of numbers, idioms, positions of straight lines, fractions, layers of the earth and so much more!
The children have really enjoyed working on our classroom auction project. Using collected and donated fabric scraps, the students are creating a beautiful mosaic image of a desert landscape viewed through the whimsical peek of a keyhole. Inspired by our Alice in Wonderland fall festival theme and the beautiful desert that we call home, this kinusaiga art piece is a unique and fun project. If you are unfamiliar with kinusaiga art, I recommend looking up a quick video to get a better idea of what your students have been doing in class. Please be sure to attend the Fall Festival Art Walk to see our amazing project firsthand.
After fall break we will begin our classroom observations and teacher conferences. When signing up, please remember a few things. So that we may accommodate all of our families, observations and conferences are limited to one per child. Separate signup links will be sent for the observation and the conference. Please select your observation time first, then select a conference date that takes place after your observation time, so that we may discuss your observations during the conference. During your observation, please refrain from interacting with the students and adults in the classroom. Questions may be discussed during the conference at a later time. Lastly, please remember to keep your cell phone off and out of sight during your visit.
On a final note, we are very excited to officially welcome our new classroom pet, Frank the Tank. Frank is a young Russian Tortoise. He is an active, clumsy little “dare devil” who loves to scramble around his enclosure getting into mischief which frequently results in him tipping himself onto his back. (We adjust his habitat at night to keep him upright.) He is fun to watch and we are looking forward to increased interaction with him once he has had an opportunity to settle into his new environment.
Have a wonderful fall break and thank you again for sharing your children with us. It is our pleasure and privilege to work with them.
In peace and appreciation,
Mrs. Amie