Happy Labor Day Weekend

Dear Otter Families,

I hope you have had a relaxing and enjoyable holiday weekend. The Otters are becoming a cohesive community, and it is hard to believe that many of them were strangers just two short weeks ago.

Academics began in earnest last week. In math we are studying number sense and algebra concepts. The students took their first quiz on Thursday. The quiz covered numerical patterns, exponents and order of operations. Scores will be posted on Powerschool this week. It is my policy to allow students to learn from their mistakes. With that in mind, students will be given an opportunity to correct their errors for 50% credit back. This will be true for all quizzes but not on end of unit tests. I will explain the procedure for Quiz Revisions when I return the quizzes tomorrow.

In Social Studies we are studying geography. Our first individual project will be a Geography Glossary. This will be the major homework assignment for the rest of this week. For our next activity students will create a world map which we will convert to a three-dimensional globe. I will need several adult hands for this project. No special skills are necessary. All you need to be able to do is to help the kids draw straight lines with a yardstick. We will tackle the globe project during the week of September 20-24. If you can help, please see our class wikispaces page to sign up. The link to the wikispaces page will be posted later this week.

Don't forget, Back to School Night will be held on Wednesday, September 15. I look forward to meeting you then.

Mrs. Shimamoto