Snack: Our snack bucket is getting low. I continue to serve a morning snack as long as we have supplies. I think it is important for our kiddos to have some brain food to help them stay focused and on top of their game. Please help me provide a cracker snack for them each morning.

Jolly Grammar: We have successfully completed our first week of Jolly Grammar. Actually we completed 2 weeks in 1!  Because we spend all of first quarter reviewing Jolly Phonics we need to double up a few lessons to make it through to the end. Each week we will concentrate on one (or two when we are doubled up) spelling patterns and one (or two) grammar lessons. Last week we were focusing on /sh/ and /ch/ as well as creating sentences with capital letters, punctuation and practicing our capital letters.  The kiddos are EXTREMELY excited with the fact that they have their very own Jolly Grammar workbooks. You may have noticed last week that fewer papers came home in Friday folders. That is because of these wonderful workbooks. We keep all of the pages in them in case we need to refer to them at another time.

Writing Notebooks: Please continue to work on this homework each night. Many of the kids have finished the pink slips of paper and are working on writing tricky words and fry sight words each night. Once your child completes word list 48 I will send home a pink celebration paper explaining that they are done and the notebook can stay at home. Again, I want to ENCOURAGE everyone to keep up the routine of writing each night with their child. Help them continue to grow with writing and reading!

Book Cart/Book-It: Just another friendly reminder that we check out of the book cart on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Please keep the books at home and read them with your child. Ask them questions at the end of the story or have them retell the story to you. These books should be an easy read for them. We are wanting them to feel confident with these books and to see that they can real all by themselves.

We just finished our first month of Book-It.  Many of you have sent back your child's calendar, awesome! If you still have the calendar at home I am asking that you return it by this coming Friday. I realized on Saturday that I forgot to send home Novembers calendar on Friday. It is in your child's backpack today!! You should be coloring in on this new calendar not coloring in October days anymore. By all means if you read over the weekend please fill in those days on the November calendar. My apologies for forgetting to send it home!

Spelling: Awesome job with week 1 of spelling! Almost everyone brought back their spelling homework and it showed in our test scores.  Keep up the great work!

Science: We finished up our weather Science kit last week.  We ended with a fun lesson learning about three different types of clouds and compiling our weather calendar information. Each day during October we recorded the temperature and the weather. We discovered that is was sunny for 17 days, 86 degrees was the warmest and 35 degrees was the coolest.  I think it is safe to say that everyone enjoyed our first Science kit and were sad to see it go. We are now anxiously awaiting our balls and ramps kit to arrive.

Kalona Elementary Boosters are hosting a pork loin meal and dessert auction on November 16. Please come out and support the Boosters! The meal is a free will donation with all proceeds coming right back to KE!