Hello, 2022!

Welcome back and Happy New Year!  I can't believe it's 2022!  I hope everyone had a great holiday season and were able to soak up the time with loved ones, making memories and having fun!  As we jump into a new semester, there are some new pieces of information to share, as well as some reminders that may have been forgotten over break.  Here we go:

Classroom Happenings:

• Teaching Change:  Over break, Mrs. Stout did have her baby!  This means she will be out for several weeks on maternity leave.  While she is gone, Ms. Murt is filling in for her.  If you need to contact her about anything pertaining to Math or Science, you can email her at murtr@franklinschools.org
• Report Cards and NWEA:  These grades and scores came home last week.  There was also a parent letter that needed to be signed, indicating you have looked at your child's grades and progress.  If you have not yet signed and returned that letter, please do so as soon as possible!
• Drinks/Gum in Class:  As we are still dealing with covid and trying to ensure student safety, you know that we have been allowing the students to have water bottles in class since the water fountains are closed.  However, since coming back, the water bottles are suddenly coming to school filled with pop and/or other drinks that are not water.  To be clear, water is the only drink that is allowed in the classrooms during the school day.  In addition, I've noticed an uptick in gum chewing during the school day.  This is another item that is not allowed inside the school building.  Thanks in advance for keeping these items out of the building and classrooms.
• Missing Work:  As a reminder, students who are quarantined at home, or miss a day of school for ANY REASON, are responsible for making up that work on their own via Google Classroom.  All classwork is posted each morning and it is the responsibility of the child to complete that work for each day.  Work not completed will result in a zero in the gradebook.  If your child has questions over something while at home, they know how to email or leave a comment on work for me to see.  I will get back to them with an answer as soon as I can throughout the day.

English:

We are starting this semester with a writing unit, as we work our way through Evidence-Based Writing responses, or EBW for short.  We are looking at how to better cite evidence from a text to answer a question.  This is a skill that will be needed as the kids continue on in their schooling, so we want to get a solid jump on it now.  This week we have been working on the 3 parts of our introductory paragraph:

• Identifying the TAG (Title, Author, and Genre) of our text
• Writing a brief 2-3 sentence summary of the text
• Stating our claim (opinion) to the question prompt

Next week we will be begin working on the body of our essay as we practice citing our evidence to support our claim.

Science:

This month is space month!  It's one of my favorites!  I always tell the kids I want to be an astronaut when I grow up!  I'd love to go to the moon one day...  We spent last week getting an overview of space and talking about some of the fun things we find up there (meteors, asteroids, comets, etc).  This week we have delved deeper into our knowledge of stars and we will spend the end of the week looking at constellations.

Last week the kids made goal-mobiles and wrote out 2 academic, 1 personal, and 1future goal for themselves.  Be sure to ask your child what their goals are!  It's a new semester and we're ready to rock it!  As always, reach out with any questions or concerns.  Here we go!

-Sarah