Hi All,

First of all, many thanks for your continued support for Rio Del Mar Elementary, as well as Room 9 in particular. We have benefited from family support in so many ways: from your presence in class, at the Harvest Festival, on next week’s field trip, and delivering your children to our SBC Day, to your ongoing financial support through the Drive For Schools fundraiser, class donations of supplies, and funds. Thank you all, for the many ways you help make our school a thriving and joyful place!

This past week, our class was busy, busy, trying to finish up our fictional narratives. The kids wrote so much—yay!—that many needed extra typing time. We will celebrate publication with Mr. McMillan’s and Mr. Avey’s classes this Wednesday. After that, we will begin a short unit on “internal punctuation”, AKA commas, dashes, and semi-colons.

We also took a bit of time away from our story writing to compose short notes to fellow students in Canada. We attached the notes to postcards about Santa Cruz County. Our class will be sending additional postcards to kids across the US and Canada, who we are connecting with via the Global Read Aloud. All our contacts are classes reading the book A Boy Called Bat this month, right along with us. We still need many more postcards about SC County.

In reading, instruction has shifted from fiction to nonfiction. All of the lessons are built around strategies that address skills needed to read nonfiction well. In class, kids split their independent reading time between fiction and informational text. Kids may continue to read any type of book for their nightly reading, and should also be doing 20-40 minutes of work on the Lexia program per week. If your child is below grade level in reading, he/she should have two 20 minute sessions, in addition to the class time on Lexia. On-level students should work on the Lexia program at home once a week, for 20 minutes, and mark it on their homework Choice Board.

In math, we’ve been focusing on the area model (open array) in multiplication. Ask your child about it. I think it’s a neat, and very clear way to learn about the Distributive Property in multiplication!

Finally, this Friday our class —and Mr. Avey’s—will be heading to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for our field trip. Students should bring a lunch and drink, but no money; there will not be shopping opportunities for kids. Kids should arrive to school on time, as we’ll be leaving around 8.

Have a great week!

Carroll Mayer