Updates September 9th-13th

Happy September, and welcome back! Thank you for being patient while FUSD worked diligently on restoring all systems back to where they needed to be to ensure the safety of all students and staff, and preforming the proper maintenance needed on all computer systems to get us back to running on business as usual. The FUSD Tech team, and everyone else who spent countless hours to make sure we could be open on Monday did an amazing job, and I for one am extremely grateful for the work they put in and the response of the district! The 2 cyber snow days put us slightly behind, so next week will be spent doing some catch up, then we will be back on track. Here's how next week will look academically...

Math:  We will wrap up our unit on addition word problems, which will conclude with a unit test about mid week. After this we will  begin counting on to solve addition problems.  

ELA:  Due to our 2 day week last week we will continue with our short o spelling words. This means I will send home the same list of words so that the children may continue practicing their short o list, and the test will be given on Friday. We had a few weeks of cushion built into our yearly schedule for spelling, so this will be just fine. Also, we did not have an opportunity to read "The Dot" so we will do that this week. We did have the opportunity to start our grammar lessons with Ms. Perkins however. We have started learning about nouns and verbs. I will continue to reinforce these two concepts with additional lessons this week. Ms. Perkins will also be teaching about pronouns, adjectives, and prepositions. Then we will be learning how to put all our parts of speech together to form sentences.  We are also continuing our handwriting lessons, currently focusing on correctly writing numbers 0-20.

Social Studies:  We will be hitting all our Ancient Mesopotamia concepts we did not get to last week. Ziggurats, cuneiform writing, and inventions/contributions of the Ancient Mesopotamians. Next week we will be concluding our unit of study with a taste test of foods from Ancient Mesopotamian times. Please be on the look out in next weeks blog for food we will need donated for this special lesson. 

Science:  Before we begin our science units I like to introduce the students to science by reading the book, "What Is a Scientist?"  This gives them an ideas of what a scientist does, and what they will be doing as scientists in our classroom. Then we will cut and paste scientists into our notebooks and write adjectives to describe a scientist. This activity also gives us an opportunity to become familiar with our science notebooks and start hearing terms such as predict and hypothesis and data.  

Marshall Gallop:  This Friday our students will be attending the Pep Rally for our Marshall Mustang Gallop. The Gallop is our amazing annual PTO fundraiser. Your students should be bringing home pledge packets on Friday, I believe. These are to collect pledges from friends and family members who would like to donate to our school fundraiser. Pledges may take form in an amount per lap (for instance, someone may want to pledge $1 per every lap your child runs on Gallop day) or they may be a flat donation in any amount. The actual Gallop (the day the kiddos run their laps) will be on Friday, September 27th. We will be sending home volunteer forms for this day as well. This is just the basic information I have thus far, more information will be coming. Please remember, this is the only fundraiser for Marshall for the entire year. We highly encourage as much participation as we can get, seeing as 100% of these funds always go directly back to our students. Last year the money raised went into buying all the back to school supplies for every students and teacher here at Marshall. This is very unprecedented in our field of work, and I know I for one was extremely grateful not to have to buy supplies out of my pocket for the beginning of the year. This was the first year I did not have to do this, and it would not have been possible if not for this fundraiser and the generosity of our amazing PTO! I know they plan to continue this contribution to our families, so let's all do our share in making this happen and go out there and collect those donations! Thank you for your participation!

Picture Day:  Marshall picture day is next Wednesday, September 18th.  Picture packets should be going home soon!

I really look forward to seeing the kids Monday morning, and having a full week of school to do some learning! Let's do this! -Ms. Shaw