Dear Parents,
     Happy Thursday!   It is Homecoming week!  The kids are excited about the early out and parade on Friday.  They are also talking about the game.  Please remember your  student is to sit with you or in the student section at the game.  They are monitoring the kids.  They also may ask your child to not return to any future games if they are constantly running around.  The student section is on the north end of bleachers.  These kids are to sit towards the top.  the High School students are along the bottom then the middle school and then elementary students.  I would hate to have anyone asked to leave!  

Friday, September 21 -  We have an early out!  It is earlier than normal.  We will be putting kids on the buses at 12:30 and getting them moving.  So the carline bell will be ringing about 12:35 or 12:40. Please note this change.  The Parade starts at 1:30 this year.  If your child is riding on the float make sure you have turned the permission form in and make sure they get where they need to be for the float.  They will not be getting on at St. Malachy school.  If your child is riding they received a paper today explaining where to go.  Students must have permission form to ride.  Have a fun and safe Homecoming!!

Language Arts -  This week we are reading a story called The Power of W.O.W.  This story is actually a drama or play.  It is about a bookmobile in Dallas, Texas that lost its funding and cannot continue to bring books to a neighborhood that is too far away from the library.  The kids in the neighborhood decide to raise money to help save the bookmobile, which they call Words on Wheels or W.O.W.  I teaches the kids that when a community pulls together to help they can get things done.  It is a "feel good" or inspirational story really.  The kids enjoy it because it is written as a play and has parts for them to read.  We are working on sentences in grammar.  We are talking about sentence fragments, run-on sentences and complete sentences.  The vocabulary strategy we covered was on the prefixes non- and mis-.  We will be taking our end of the week test tomorrow and spelling post test.  Please check with your student to be sure they are studying their yellow vocabulary packet.  Those 5 words are the ones they will be assessed over.  

Math -  This week in math we finished talking about rounding numbers and began learning about renaming numbers.  The renaming of numbers can be difficult.  It is like taking the number 1,800 and saying 18 hundreds, or saying that 150 is 15 tens.  When you have a number in the hundred thousands you can say it 5 different ways using all levels of place value.  We will use this skill later in the year when learning multiplication so it is important to get now.  The kids have had a busy week doing work in this subject.  We will move next week into adding and subtracting larger whole numbers.  These are quick one day lessons because this is review for the students.  We end the chapter with problem-solving skills.  After that we will be looking at reviewing for our first test.  It will not be next week but probably the week after for sure.

Social Studies -  This week the students have been working on making posters on the Bill of Rights.  We have been learning about government and we will move on to learning what our rights and responsibilities are as citizens and I feel having an idea what the Bill of Rights are and how important they are will help them understand.  The posters will be displayed in our hallway.  I plan on them sharing their posters tomorrow with the class.  They were given partners and an amendment to cover. Some groups had 2 amendments.  It is fun to hear them talk about them and ask questions about what they are saying and what they mean.  Some are hard to explain what that actually means to them.

We will focus on finishing on sharing posters and completing language arts tomorrow.  It will be a very short day due to our 12:30 dismissal.  It makes it a crazy day!  Tomorrow we will most likely have a pep rally at some time also.  It is very busy!  Please have your students wear their panther gear tomorrow!  Let's show our community pride by wearing read and black!!!

Have a great weekend!  I will be busy with homecoming activities!  I also have my oldest two coming home to help their sister prepare for the dance.  I love having all my kids under one roof!  Especially in light of the tragic loss of the student at Iowa State.  That hits a little close to home so I will be happy to hug my kids!  

God Bless,
Mrs. Sickels