Updates and announcements

I am so excited to have a “normal” week! The students definitely earned their breaks this month, and I am ready to dive into the second quarter.

We are beginning Where the Red Fern Grows this week. Please be sure to send the book with your child.

The Book Fair will take place beginning Wednesday, October 26^th. The newsletter contains information on the when and where. There will be a wish list basket for our classroom. The Book Fair will run up until our Read-a-thon on October 31^st. Please have students submit their costume proposals (sent home last week) by this Friday, October 28^th.

Our winter dress code will begin on November 1^st.

In an effort to best serve your children, we find that time is the greatest asset. With that, it would be a tremendous help for parents to help relieve the burden of our traffic duties, both before and after school. Mr. Korth dutifully serves our school by directing traffic and checking out students form the MPR every day. If you are able and willing, please sign up to cover a traffic duty shift to allow us more time to grade student work, plan lessons, tutor students, and much more. We respectfully ask that if you choose to sign up, please sign up for multiple days as we will need to train all new volunteers. Volunteers will need to have fingerprint clearance in order to help. Study hall will be available for children of traffic volunteers. We appreciate your support!

http://www.signupgenius.com/go/20f0b4aadae2baafb6-traffic

Here is a message from our Spelling Bee Leads:

Dear Parents,

We are very excited to inform you of Archway Arete’s third annual spelling bee! It will be open to all first through fifth graders. There will be a classroom bee to determine who is eligible to compete in the school bee. From there, the winner of the school bee will continue on to the Great Hearts District Spelling Bee. The dates for each are as follows:

November 7-10: written portion in individual classrooms

November 14-18: oral class bee in individual classrooms

December 5 (6 pm): Archway Arete School Bee in the gym

January 24 (5 pm): Great Hearts District School Bee at Archway Veritas auditorium

For the school bee, we will be following the same guidelines as will be used for the District bee and on. This means that students need to say “capital…” if there is a capital letter, “hyphen” if one is present, and address any spaces or accent marks. A student may start over in spelling a word but is not allowed to change the spelling that they previously used.

The speller’s role according to the Scripps National Spelling Bee: The speller makes an effort to face the judges and pronounce the word for the judges before spelling it and after spelling it. The speller while facing the judges makes an effort to utter each letter distinctly and with sufficient volume to be understood by the judge. The speller may ask the pronouncer to say the word again, define it, use it in a sentence, provide the part of speech, provide the language(s) of origin and/or provide an alternate pronunciation or pronunciations.

Attached you will find the word list for the written portion of the test. Teachers will administer these in their classrooms the week of November 7^th and will notify parents of students who will compete in the oral portion. For more information on the Scripps National Spelling Bee, please visit http://spellingbee.com/parents-and-students.

Happy spelling!

Warm Regards,

Victoria Chilson and Leslie Ellingson

VChilson@ArchwayArete.org; LEllingson@ArchwayArete.org

Our week in learning

This week in writing we will begin our second formal writing assessment, a personal narrative.  We will start the week by discussing point of view and how to write an introductory sentence to gain the reader’s attention.  By the end of the week students will have completed their pre-writing.

In Literature we will begin Where the Red Fern Grows and will focus on point of view and using the text to describe the setting of a story.

We will also get back to Spalding, as well as Greek and Latin Roots.  In Poetry we will start our new poem, “Casey at Bat” in honor of the upcoming World Series!  Students will be working in groups and each student will memorize three stanzas of the poem.  We are encouraging use of props as well as lots of enthusiasm!

This week in science, the students will be acquiring knowledge about the classification of living things. This unit on classification will last approximately two weeks. There will be 2 take-home quizzes and one final assessment. They will receive the final assessment study guide on Tuesday and should work one it and review the material a little but every night to ensure readiness for that final assessment.

This week, students will take an in-depth look into the powerful Medici family. They will work on a foldable to document their findings.

Students will also continue their geography unit by learning about the states in the New England region of the United States. They will have a short geography lesson every other Wednesday.

This week our focus will be reviewing addition and subtraction of fractions with unlike denominators and mixed numbers. We will also practice using these skills to solve word problems with bar models. We will review during math groups on Wednesday and will take a short quiz on Thursday.