Hello Parents,

Welcome to November!  We hope this newsletter finds you having a good start to second quarter. The three of us truly enjoyed having a chance to meet with you during first quarter conferences.  Please feel free to contact us if anything comes up in the near future.

Reminders to Parents and Students:
-Students will be having P.E. on Thursday and Friday.  Please send your child with appropriate clothing and a pair of tennis shoes.
-Please try and take some time to respond in your child’s home journals.  They get sent home on Wednesdays and the students have really seemed to enjoy getting a chance to be pen pals with their parents and us.

Math Reminder
Just a reminder about Math facts…  Students should be practicing at home as much as possible.  Each Friday, your child’s teacher does look for their "math label" in their planners to be complete.  This skill is so valuable when it comes to being successful in Math.

Upcoming Events:
November 11th-   Discovery projects due
November 24-25 Thanksgiving break

Curriculum Update
We continue to be working hard in fourth grade.  In Reading, a focus continues to be vocabulary.  Students have been working on learning the meaning of various prefixes to help understand the meaning of the word.   In Writing, the students have been focused on sentence fluency.  In Math, we have just recently begun Chapter 4, where the students are learning all about decimals.  In Unit Study, we finished up our Earth and Earth Systems unit and have moved on to a big theme in fourth grade:  Colorado.

Discovery:
Ask your child(ren) about Discovery! Starting at the end of October, the fourth graders began their first Discovery unit on Colorado.  Discovery is an amazing opportunity for students to incorporate every subject into a student interest based project.  This first project does have more guidelines than usually due to the fact that it is the first one.  For this project, students are all creating their own, unique Colorado flag.  Projects are due on Nov. 11th.

This Month's Highlights!
Star Students this month have been:  Wyatt Shelley, Sally Ward, Shannon Hobbs, Josh Esslinger, Katie Guillen, Shannen Padilla, Jonathan Varela, and Kasenia Sanchez.

**A big thanks to Mrs. Degen and Mrs. Lindal for putting together a wonderful Red Ribbon Week.  The students were thrilled to get a chance to visit with the uniformed officers and see a real DEA helicopter close up!!!