Happy Holidays Red-tailed Hawk Families!
It's the most wonderful time of the year! Not only because there is so much great work and focus happening in the classroom, but there are several meaningful holidays and traditions for families during this time. We have many different cultures and backgrounds represented in our classroom community, and would love to have you come in and share some of your favorite family traditions or celebrations. If you have a holiday, tradition, or celebration that you would like to share with the class, we'd love to have you come in and talk with us. Please email me to arrange a time to welcome you.
There is a large variety of work happening in the classroom, and now that our library trips are resuming, interest in research has never been higher! Thank you to everyone who has been able to send in their student's library card. We will begin rotating trips over the next few weeks, so that the students become more familiar with the library, and understand all the different things it has to offer.
In class, the older students are finishing up their final drafts of their multi-paragraph papers, and will soon begin working on another writing genre. Several students have begun working with sentence analysis, and are enjoying composing silly sentences. We are also working with suffixes, prefixes and base words. Our younger students are working with the grammar boxes on nouns, articles, adjectives and verbs. We also have fraction equivalence, angle measurement, fractional time, and money work happening. Biology continues to be a very popular work, with a variety of vertebrate studies happening.
While December is a short school time, it is a very busy school month. We have a lot of fun things happening in the next few weeks! The first of which is our classroom social Sweets Swap on Thursday, December 5th at 6:00pm. Weather permitting, we will be having this at Desert Foothills Park. This will be a fun night to meet and get to know other Red-tailed Hawk families, and trade some delicious treats. Specific information will be coming home, so please be on the lookout for that through School Cues.
Another exciting event will be our first class field trip! On Thursday, December 19th (the day before the last day of school before the break), we will be touring the Arizona Capitol Museum. We have a morning reservation, and will follow it up with a picnic lunch across the street at Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza. The permission slip will be posted on School Cues the first week of December.
Lastly, on the final day of school before winter break, the Red-tailed Hawks will have a DIY GIFT SWAP! This will be done "secret Santa-style", with the students randomly selecting gifts. Gifts should be of a value between $7-$10 dollars (please no more or less, in order to have some equity in the gifts), and must be HOMEMADE and ANONOMOUS. This means it could be something some scratch, or something that involves some aspect of child-effort. (For example, a handpainted mug, or sewn pillowcase). Also, please do not put your child's name anywhere on the gift. A more detailed instruction form will come home next week, however, it's good for students to start thinking of some ideas. Please keep in mind, that gifts should be gender-neutral and secular, as you don't know which child will receive the gift. Here are a few links for ideas;
https://teaching2and3yearolds.com/easy-christmas-gifts-made-by-kids/
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/150941024998120112/
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/97108935732059224/
https://rediscoveredfamilies.com/christmas-gifts-for-kids-to-make/
Thank you and we look forward to seeing you at our Sweets Swap on December 5th!
In peace and appreciation,
Mrs. Amie