Breath in, breath out... mindfulness

Hello Families! It feels like this week just flew by! A lot was packed in and looking ahead, we have two very busy and packed weeks before our February break!

Students began a new math unit, new Superkids unit and a new writing unit. In math we are starting to look at place value and decomposing and composing 2-digit numbers. We are learning about base 10 numbers and students are really strong with this new concept. We will revisit our last unit, which was focused on subtraction later in the year.

In Superkids, we have started long vowels and learned about two syllable patterns: open syllables with a long vowel sound and closed syllables with a short vowel sound. Please ask your child about these. I am very impressed with how comfortable and confident students already are with this. Students are learning the new memory words: here, you, only, said, of (some of which are review). Today we read a story and we discussed the text and will be working on drawing conclusions from text next week.

On Wednesday we had our field trip to downtown Amherst to try some of our local restaurants. Students did a fantastic job and we had so many parent chaperones-THANK YOU! Parents truly made this field trip a success for us. Students are starting their yelp reviews in class and they should be completed and posted on yelp no later than our February break. If your child does any writing at home, please encourage neatness, complete sentences, punctuation and capitalization. Spelling is less of a concern so long as students are spelling phonetically right now.

We have also had a high school student, Will, start to help us in the afternoon for a couple of days a week. He will be helping both us and Mr. James as a volunteer for a course he is taking. Will is an awesome person, student and athlete. We are so lucky to have him!


Thank you to all of the families who made it our to mindfulness on Thursday night! I think it is such a great thing to have going on at our school and in homes! I really enjoyed playing math games with the students that night but I am sorry I wasn't able to attend the presentation as well. Tara, Amy and Ms. B. are awesome and have brought mindfulness to some of our staff meetings.


Here are some upcoming things we have going on in the next 2 weeks:

February 8th is a 1:20 dismissal
100th day is February 9th (assuming no snow days)
Crazy Heart Party/Crazy Hair Day is February 14th-a note has been sent home about this.
Will's last Senior Home Basketball Game is February 17th at 7 pm @ Amherst Middle School-Boys High School Varsity Basketball Game-Let's all show up to support our friend, Will, who has been helping us in the classroom. He is a tremendous athlete. This is informal but it might be fun to gather together and cheer him on. Adults are $5 and kids are free.

Wish List:

Peanut Free snack (almost out), manilla folders, clear binder sleeves, thin black dry erase markers