Can you believe it is already a week into December? It is holiday time and we still have much work to do!
We are planning a special Otter Activity for Friday, December 17. It has become an annual tradition for the Otters to celebrate the holiday season by making Gingerbread Houses. We will need lots of help as well as donated items for this fun-filled afternoon. Please check out our WIKISPACE (click here) and sign up where you can. Your child will bring home a note about the activity tomorrow. You may sign up by sending the note back with your child, but we prefer you to sign up online.
The Second Harvest Food Drive is in its second week, and the Otters are now at 72% participation. Our goal is 100% participation, so if your child has not yet brought in a can, please encourage him/her to do so by Friday. Tomorrow is Mrs. Carlson's birthday, and it is a Dartmouth tradition for kids to donate a can in her honor on that day. Please remind your child to bring a CAN FOR CARLSON tomorrow, Wednesday.
Academically speaking, in math, we are continuing to work on fraction operations. We will take a short quiz on the four operations and then proceed to work on decimal operations before our chapter test on Friday, December 17. Tangram projects have been turned in and will be graded soon. Many students have finished or will soon finish using up their first spiral notebook for math. Please make sure that they are supplied with a new one when they run out of pages. Keep the old notebook handy so they may refer to it later in the year if they need to.
In Social Studies we have begun our study of Ancient Egypt. The kids are fascinated with this amazing and exotic civilization. We are tying our study of Egypt into the Language Arts class, where the kids are learning to research and write a report on a topic of their choosing. After gaining background information on their subject, they are to create a project at home to share with the class. The project must be as authentic as possible. The due date for the report is January 7. All work on this major assignment will be conducted at school. The accompanying project is due on January 19. Egypt Night is scheduled for Tuesday, February 1. Please mark your calendar as you won't want to miss this exciting event.
Thank you to many Otter parents who continually support our class. Our biggest need is currently copy paper. Our needs are ongoing so please feel free to contribute anything from my list on the right hand column of this blog at any time.
I hope to see many of you at the Gingerbread House activity.
Mrs. Shimamoto
