Looking ahead to the week of October 7

Mrs. Gomez, a favorite Bookman Beacon of ours, came to our community last week and shared about her Hispanic heritage. We had such an awesome time learning about the contributions of famous Hispanic people and even learning a little Spanish! Gracias, Sra. Gómez! 

Hello, families!  I hope you all are having a wonderful week!  We hope to see you walking with us Wednesday morning, in honor of National Walk to School Day!  We will be walking on the school grounds, 7:30 - 8:00!

Please look for the next permission form going home in your child's communication folder this week.  It is for our "Being There Experience" to the Lexington County Museum.  The permission form needs to be signed and returned no later than October 16.  As you volunteer to chaperone, please keep in mind our chaperone guidelines/procedures, which were outlined in your child's Open House booklet.  

In your child's communication folder, you will also find the next Envision home letter for our third unit of study in math.  You may keep this copy!  It doesn't need to be returned!

Looking ahead:  As mathematicians, students will continue working on multi-digit addition and subtraction.  We will cover lessons 3-3 through 3-6, if your child would like to take home his/her math book to review each day.  Students are also reminded that we use the textbook as a resource.  The problems within each lesson make great practice work!  In reading and language arts, students will kick off the Daily 5 rotation they have been waiting for since the start of school!  They have been practicing all of the elements of the rotation for the past few weeks, so they are ready.  During this rotation, whole group lessons will focus on different genres (we have about a dozen to study, so this unit will take more than one week!).  The children will continue their study of the parts of speech and begin writing their own narratives.  As historians, students will begin their first unit of study in social studies.  They will learn all about the regions of South Carolina, as well as, our state's landforms and river systems.  

*Please note:  Students can take home ANY textbook, ANY day of the week, so long as they return it the following school day.  It is your child's responsibility to remember to take it home and bring it back!

The Book Fair is here!  Students will have a Book Fair preview this Friday (October 4).  If you would like to send money with your child that day, you're more than welcome to do so!  The Book Fair will end later next week.

Classroom donation opportunity:  A part of our Daily 5 rotation will require students to "work with words."  If you have any word games (examples:  Scrabble, Upwords, Boggle, Apples to Apples (Junior Edition), Bananagrams, or unused Mad Lib books), which you would like to donate to our classroom, we would be forever grateful!  

A note from Kindergarten teachers and students:

Dear Friends,

The kindergarten charity this year is the City of Columbia Animal Shelter. We are very excited about collecting donations to be delivered when we go on our being there experience Oct. 29th. We will collect donations until the last week of October. A table will be set up in the cafeteria for the donations. This is a school wide effort and we appreciate all the donations that will be sent. Thank you so much.

*A letter went home in last week's "Beacon."

A reminder from our third grade team:  Parents, you are always welcome to eat breakfast or lunch with your child. If you would like to eat with your child, we encourage you to sit at the school assigned guest tables. In the morning, you may sit with your child at a separate round table away from the other breakfast eaters. We do this so students will follow procedures, have adequate time to eat their breakfast, and get to class in a timely manner. At lunch, we have guest tables on the far side of the cafeteria. You are asked to sit there, so there are enough seats for all of our third graders at lunch. You are welcome to sit among the third grade students on our specified "Friends and Family" lunch day this year.  Thanks so much for your cooperation!

I hope you all have a great rest of the week and a super weekend!

Check out some snapshots from our "Being There Experience" to Riverbanks Zoo!  We enjoyed seeing all of the animals and reviewing what we know about animal adaptations!  Thank you again to Mrs. Guntupalli and Ms. Kannaday for chaperoning our trip!