I hope all the students enjoyed their extra half day off. I attended a professional development about a new reading program we are going to start using called myOn. It is not up and running for us yet, but as soon as it is I will let you know all the details. We are all really excited to use it and it is a great program. We will also be doing IXL again for math practice this year; however, we have hit a few glitches and so we are just waiting for that to get taken care of so we can start that.

This last Monday was International Peace Day. We celebrated it by reading Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. We have also been working on peace cranes ourselves. The folding takes time and they are a bit complicated so not all of us have got to make them yet. It is a work in progress.

Last week we started learning The National Anthem and we have been practicing it after our pledge everyday.

In cultural this last week we learned about geography. As level 1s we learned the continents and latitude and longitude. Level 2s learned about the layers of the earth. Level 3s learned about the sun and it’s layers. It was a joy to watch as many of the students took it upon themselves to have mini lessons on what I taught them with each other.

Looking forward at things to come, October 7 is picture day. Reminders for this will be sent home soon. October 12-14 (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday) are parent teacher conferences and will be early out days. Thursday and Friday, the 15 and 16 are fall break so we will not have school those days. Sign ups for PTC will be up and ready later this week. The book fair will also be open the sames times as PTC.

We will be having a field trip with Ms. Kaley’s class to Black Island Farms in Syracuse on October 21. Instead of taking your children to school and picking them up at the school, you will drop them off and pick them up at the farms. We will have more info and the permission slips next week.

Please remember to sign up for snack. We have a lot of empty openings left. If these don’t get filled, we will not have snack those weeks. The link is to the right of the blog or here http://www.wejoinin.com/sheets/rizyn.

Thanks for all that you do.

Ms. Jalee