Grand Day Event

Dear Parents,

Our Grand Event is coming to First Grade on Tuesday, September 29th.  This is a chance for grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc... to come and see your child's classroom and do an activity with them.  Your child will also be able to go see our book fair with their special visitor for 15 minutes. We will go into the book fair from 9 am to 9:15 am then we will do an activity from 9:15 until 9:45. Please be in the lobby waiting a little before 9:00 am.
Your child's special visitor can be anyone over the age of 18.  Please send only one person per child.  Your visitor must sign into the office before coming into your child's classroom.
If your child is unable to have anyone attend please let me know, we will have some room mothers there for assistance.

Student led parent teacher conferences

Dear Parents, 
In a few weeks we will be having student led parent teacher conferences. This year Hawthorn will be doing something a little different than normal. The conferences will be student led. This is where your child will lead you the parent or guardian through what he or she has been learning this year. Here is a sign up sheet. Please follow the link to the Google docs form and sign up for a time. Parent teacher conferences will be held this month on Wednesday September 30th and Thursday September 1st. Please don't forget the time you sign up and you will need to bring your child to the conference.  This conference will not work with out the student and the parent together :)

Here is the link:
 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sHhdq9f7hELNNJOMV9LT8CQF0eo_RREV2ZEIVXYpc9s/edit?usp=sharing

Scholastic

BOOK DEALS
Have you considered ordering books for your child from Scholastic? There are wonderful deals in here and some really fun books. Each time you order our class receives free books! Score! Visit this link to order. Our class code is  PC4BP. Books are delivered straight to school about a week or two after ordering. Happy shopping

Chrysanthemum

On Thursday 9/10/11 I read them the book Chrysanthemum. Its a story about a little girl who loves her name so much its absolutely perfect. On her first day of school all the other kids start making fun of her name and she no longer loves her name. During music her music teacher makes her feel special by telling all the students that her name is long to like Chrysanthemums name. In the end she ends up loving her name and all the other students want long names as well. After I read the story I pulled out a big beautiful heart. Then I talked about what would happen if someone made fun of me. I took the heart all crunched it up into a ball. As a class we talked about how some peoples feelings might be hurt when you say rude things to them. We talked about how Chrysanthemums heart wrinkled up when the kids were making fun of her. We then talked about how we could fix the wrinkled heart. Some said tape it others said we could smooth it out. We also talked about how when we wrinkle someone else's heart we should try to fix it. After out discussion we all wrote our name on bandaids and tried to fix the wrinkled heart.

Communities

We have been learning a lot of great things in our IB Unit about Sharing the Planet. One of the things we have been learning about is communities and community helpers. In Spanish they have also been learning about communities and how different community helpers and places are said in Spanish. Also in ART this week Mrs. Heinecke came in and helped us make community helper hats, accessories and tools. We are going to use these for a skit we will be putting on in a couple of weeks. They turned out so cute and the kids were very creative with their accessories and tools.

Road to Sucess

The Road to Success program aligns our school with many community partners that want to help our students succeed in reading.  The focus is literacy and in the past few years they have seen amazing results.

The Road to Success program provided the following print materials/prizes:

• Classroom/hallway information poster
• Indoor tracking banner.  We list each teacher/classroom and track the reading minutes for each week.  We list the reading goal and the kids can see how the school is progressing.  This is placed on the wall by the lunch room.
• Outdoor Banner.  This is generally placed on the fence.
• Treasure Box
• Prizes

Our school will track students reading time using the RTSUtah.com (www.rtsutah.com) web tool.  Tracking may be done at home or school.  Once the registration process is complete the students will login to their RTS account and log the minutes they have read.  This can be done daily or weekly.  If a student reads 5 days in a week they earn 1 ticket for a drawing.  If they read 7 days a week they earn 2 tickets.  This drawing happens approximately 4 times a year.  The prizes for these drawings are: a Bike, or a Scooter or an iPod Shuffle.  So at each of these drawings all the tickets are entered and we draw out 1 winner.  The more they read the more tickets they have entered.  Also, at the last drawing of the year we include all tickets entered from the entire year and we draw 2 winners to receive a $50 UESP Savings certificate.  We have fun at the assemblies and I also love to invite Chief the RTS Mascot to join us for a couple of them.  The kids love him! 

Also, each week we track the minutes read and award the classroom who read the most minutes with our infamous Reading Trophy and recognition/announcement during the Monday morning announcements.  It is so great to hear the cheers from the winning class!  Once a classroom has won the trophy 3 times the entire class wins an additional prize from the RTS Treasure box.  Once a month we total the number of minutes each class has read and award the top class in each grade with a prize from the RTS Treasure Box.  The prizes range from simple erasers to bouncy balls to food coupons and free bowling.  These prizes are provided by RTS.  We will also set a school reading goal and use the prizes as incentive or award as we reach these goals.  Last year our goal as a school was 2,000,000 minutes and we exceeded this number. 



To register your child on Road To Success Please go to www.rtsutah.com and click "parent" then click "register my child" and register this code RTS-23130. Only register once please. Log all reading minutes here to win prizes with the school. Also road to success is a bonus place to log reading minutes. In order for your child to get a grade on reading minutes you need to be recording their minutes on the back of their homework folder on the calendar. 20 minutes for each week day.
Thank you,
Sally Lambeth

Important Parent Infomation

Please Read Important

Dear Parents,

I would like to address some things and some questions I have had please read all of them so you know what it going on.

·      Absences and tardiest- Please make sure your child is on time to school. If they come to school after 8:20 they are late and marked absent. They need to check into the office to be excused this will still be counted as a tardy. If your child is going to be gone they need to be excused.  I cannot excuse absences. If your child is going to be gone you must call and let the front office know and excuse them.

·      Grades- I have been putting grades in the system. Please don’t freak out if your student has one or two 0’s. I am still getting grades in. If they have a lot of 0’s then you should worry. Also I messed up on the spelling grade and have not been able to fix it. So as of right now everyone has an F in spelling. So don’t freak out I will try to get it fixed as soon as I can.

·      Homework- Your student should now be getting a packet of homework sent home every week sent home on Mondays. There is usually three to four math lessons, a writing work sheet, and  a spelling list which is on the side of the writing worksheet. This week the writing work sheet is about nouns. We have gone over nouns several times as a class. I want them to do the homework please don’t help them very much. I want to know what they can do on their own not what parents know. I usually try not to grade whether it’s right or wrong. I will just be checking to see if they got it done and how well they knew how to do it. I only grade homework whether they did it or not. Please send back Homework on Friday mornings. On Fridays I will send home all work that was done in class that week. Please then send an empty homework folder back on Monday please.

·      Reading Homework- Students must read 20 minutes every weeknight, whether that’s reading homework, books or what ever just have them read for 2o minutes. Please record the reading on the back of the homework folder on the September Calendar Record the time and initial by it. This will count towards a grade at the end of the month. At the end of the month I will collect the calendar and I will record who has read. Then I will replace the calendar with a new one.  If you would like you can record it on road to success. Unfortunately I do not no much about road to success and will need to get the code for it so you can log on and record it.

·      Water Bottles-Your children can bring a water bottle to school. It must stay in their backpack. They can get drinks during break time, when we come back from break time or independent work time. If it becomes a problem then I will ask them not to bring it in anymore. Remind your children the more they drink from their bottle the more they have to go to the bathroom. First grade only allows bathroom breaks before morning recess, lunchtime, and before afternoon recess. Some students are not taking advantage of this time and not going, then they ask to go during class time, which interrupts our teaching time. I will usually let them go if it's an emergency. If it becomes a habit I will have them do a chore for me to be able to go to the bathroom. I hope you understand that this is a whole first grade rule and we do this because when students leave during a lesson to go to the bathroom and then come back they are lost, and some interrupt the class when they come back.

·      Pokemon Cards- Pokemon cards are not allowed at school at all. It is become a problem already and I know was a problem in years past with students. If I catch them with them I will take them away and you as a parent can come get them from me.

·      Spelling Tests- We take a pretest on Mondays, then a post test on Fridays. I will send home tests the next Monday the following week. For morning work on Mondays we graph the scores that they got from the following week. We then compare and contrast our scores.

·      Parent Teacher Conferences- Parent teacher conferences are coming up soon. They will be on Sept. 30^th and Oct. 1^st. These will be a student lead conference. This means you need to bring your child to the conference. During the conference they will show you what they know and what we have learned in class. Each conference will be about 15 minutes. These Conferences will mainly be about academics, so if you need to take about behaviors going on please set up another time to meet.  I will let you know more about this in a week or so.

·      Emails- My email is not always working properly. I get a lot of emails a day so if I don’t email you back in a day or two please email me again. For some reason some emails are not showing up on my school computer and only on my home computer. So please if you are trying to get a hold of me please just email me again.

Sorry this is so long if you have any more questions email me I will try to answer them.

Sally Lambeth