1-22-16

1-22-16

Yearbooks are now on sale.  Flyers were sent home today.  You can fill out the order form and send it back to school with your child or order on-line  www.balfour.com.  There is a processing fee if you order on-line.  All yearbook orders are due Feb. 19th unless you are ordering on-line.  On-line orders are due before March 11th.

"Father Daughter Dance is SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 6TH, 6:00-8:00 pm. Parent volunteers and snack donations are needed. Please visit our event link for a list of needs: http://tinyurl.com/lcnd9tf   

Second Childhood, a consignment store in the Carillion Centre on South Westnedge, is working with our school to help our girls in need of a dress for the dance. Please consider donating any of your clean, gently worn dresses to the FREE rack- just mention it is for Lake Center.  Our Lake Center girls in need, accompanied by a parent, may choose a dress from the FREE rack, when they mention “Lake Center’s Father Daughter Dance”, now until February 6th

Presale ticket order forms should have gone home this week to each family. The front office will take the order forms and $5 payments which are due Friday, Jan 22nd. You will receive dance tickets the following to go home by Wednesday for the dance.

Please feel free to contact me anytime with concerns or questions: Maggie Piotter at maggie.piotter@yahoo.com

This should be a lot of fun! Thank you for helping me share the information with our families!

Record's Day

Next Friday, January 29th is record's day so there will not be any school for students.  This gives teachers a day to get caught on on grading for report cards that will be sent home in February.  We are exactly half way through the school year.

A lot of our social studies and language arts this week focused on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.  I used this as an introduction to other famous Americans so we could get a couple of informative writings done.  We all completed a informative writing on MLK's life.  I then had the children break into small groups to pick another famous American to learn about.  We still need a little more time to complete those writings.

We also completed all reading assessments needed for Unit 3.

Lesson 28

Objective:  Subtract from 200 and from numbers with zeros in the tens place.

Lesson 29

Objective:  Use and explain the totals below written method using words, math drawings, and numbers.

Lesson 31

Objective:  Solve two-step word problems within 100.

1-15-16

1-15-16

January 14, 2016

Dear Parents,

My name is Katelyn Hiscock, and I am the new student teacher in your child’s classroom.  I will be co-teaching with Mr. Critz for the next fifteen weeks. I am studying special education with a focus in emotional impairments at Western Michigan University. My minor is in English.  I have not yet completed my Special Education internship yet, I will be doing that in the fall.  I grew up in the Mattawan/Lawton area and went to Mattawan schools. I have two older sisters. I live in the Wesley Intentional Living Center, which is owned by the Wesley Foundation. I am heavily involved with the Wesley Foundation on WMU’s campus. It is a United Methodist campus ministry. I enjoy traveling and volunteering. I have been on two mission trips thus far: one, to New Orleans, and one to Nicaragua. In May, I will be going to Africa on another mission trip. I currently work at The Kalamazoo Free Store, which is located in the basement of Sunnyside United Methodist Church. 

I am excited to be at Lake Center Elementary School, and thrilled to be teaching and interacting with your children.

Sincerely,

Ms. Katelyn Hiscock

Our food drive has been extended by one day since we had a snow day last Tuesday.  Please send in all canned goods and non-perishable products by Monday, January 18th.  We only have 13 canned goods as of this morning so please send in what you can. 

Jump Rope for Heart will take place Feb. 8th-12th

We kicked off our Jump Rope For Heart program in P.E. this week and our school’s event is right around the corner!  You can get a jump start by registering online and sending emails NOW. Please follow the instructions below to join the Lake Center team!

1.         Go to www.heart.org/jump

2.         Click register now,

3.         Choose Portage, MI

4.         Select Lake Center Elementary and join team.

5.         Login

You can also use the Jump Rope for Heart App for fundraising and/or the collection envelope that is being sent home this week, but using the online system is so much easier and your child can earn more prizes that are exclusive to online donations only!

Thanks for your support!

Mrs. Kitchen, PE Instructor

We have a field trip coming up on Wednesday, January 20th.  We will be going to see a dance concert called Alchemia that will be performed by Momix.  We will be traveling to Miller Auditorium.  We will leave Lake Center around 9 and return around 12.  We will miss our time in the cafeteria that day so we'll be eating lunch in our room.  Please make sure everyone brings their own lunch on that day or orders a sack lunch from the cafeteria.

Our January book order is due by next Friday, January 22nd.  You can either send in your order with a check made out to Scholastic or go on-line and use our class code(DX98H).  I'm going to try and do a better job of sending home book orders each month.

This week we’ll ask, “What might cause a story character to change?” In the humorous fiction story Officer Buckle and Gloria, we’ll read about the teamwork between a police officer and his dog. We’ll read about a different kind of teamwork in the play Safety at Home.

Target Vocabulary: attention, buddy, obeys, speech, enormous, safety, shocked, station 

Phonics Skills: Compound words; schwa vowel sound (was) 

Vocabulary Strategy: Dictionary entry 

Comprehension Skill: Cause and effect—tell how one event makes another happen 

Comprehension Strategy: Monitor/ clarify—find ways to figure out what doesn’t make sense 

Lesson 24 

Objective: Use manipulatives to represent subtraction with decompositions of 1 hundred as 10 tens and 1 ten as 10 ones.

Lesson 25 

Objective: Relate manipulative representations to a written method.

Lesson 26 

Objective: Use math drawings to represent subtraction with up to two decompositions and relate drawings to a written method.

Lesson 27 

Objective: Subtract from 200 and from numbers with zeros in the tens place.

1-8-15

1-8-15

We will be having a WMU intern joining us for the second semester.  Her name is Katelyn Hiscock and she starts on Monday, January 11th.  I always find it very beneficial to have an intern in the room.  It allows more one-on-one time with students and we can also take advantage of small groups during W.I.N. time.  She will just be observing the classroom routines for the first couple of weeks before she starts teaching any subjects.  I will have her send out a letter introducing herself to everyone shortly.

We have a field trip coming up on Wednesday, January 20th.  We will be going to see a dance concert called Alchemia that will be performed by Momix.  We will be traveling to Miller Auditorium.  We will leave Lake Center around 9 and return around 12.  We will miss our time in the cafeteria that day so we'll be eating lunch in our room.  Please make sure everyone brings their own lunch on that day or orders a sack lunch from the cafeteria.

Winter is Here!

Please make sure to send your child every day with a hat, boots, gloves, warm winter coat, and snow pants.  We will be going outside as much as possible.  We do not have a ton of extra items in the office to borrow and each time a coat or pants are borrowed, we have to take them home to wash.

Student council food drive will take place on Jan. 11-15.  Items from this food drive will be donated to 12 Baskets.  The top class will receive a reward from the student council.  More information to be sent home when we return from break.

This week we’ll ask, “How do you know when story ideas are important?” We’ll read the biography of Helen Keller, who learned how to communicate with help from her devoted teacher. And we’ll learn about other ways to communicate in the informational text Talking Tools. 

Target Vocabulary: curious, imitated, knowledge, motion, silence, illness, darkness, behavior 

Phonics Skills: Words with long o (o, oa, ow) [open, coat, bow]

Vocabulary Strategy: Suffix -ly (means “in a certain way”) 

Comprehension Skill: Main ideas and details—tell important ideas and details about a topic 

Comprehension Strategy: Summarize— stop to tell important ideas as you read

Lesson 19 

Objective: Relate manipulative representations to a written method.

Lesson 20 

Objective: Use math drawings to represent additions with up to two compositions and relate drawings to a written method.

Lesson 21 

Objective: Use math drawings to represent additions with up to two compositions and relate drawings to a written method.

Lesson 22 

Objective: Solve additions with up to four addends with totals within 200 with and without two compositions of larger units.

Maps

Over the next few weeks we will be studying map skills. Students will organize information to make and interpret simple maps of their local surroundings, use cardinal directions to locate places on a map, and use map keys to locate important features on a map. This week we played a few games involving the cardinal directions and everyone made a compass rose.