Happy Holidays...from your little elves!

The Roadrunners will officially be using Homework Binders starting this Friday, December 4! Homework will be assigned each night and every student is required to bring their binder to school each day. We will review the homework the following morning, so it is extremely important that your student is on time. This will help prepare the Roadrunners for upper school and encourage more responsibility for their assignments. Thank you for your continued support!

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Roadrunners used their creativity today to make fruit turkeys! We also read about the first Thanksgiving and people long ago. We shared what we were thankful for....caring families, amazing friends and a wonderful school we enjoy each and everyday!

Career Day

Thank you Mr. Duvuru for visiting our class and educating us about your career! Our class was able to learn lots of information about Mr. Duvuru and what he does at IBM, which stands for International Business Machine. Did you know that there are IBM's in 221 countries? Mr. Duvuru graduated from the University of Oregon with a masters in Computer Science. He currently writes software for the database at IBM. He has 13 years of experienc! His incredible intelligence helps our community is so many ways! Ask your student about our guest speaker and what they learned.

Our mini model of Portland's community turned out to be a huge success!!!! Next week we will begin discussing our future careers...

Quick Reminder:

The Roadrunners' Back to School Night will take place on October 21 at 6:30 pm. We are requesting your child to be present during this event. Throughout the evening we will briefly discuss our goals for this school year, walk you through a typical day in our classroom and you will be able to observe your student in action! Thank you for your time, support and flexibility. We are looking forward to seeing you!

After our nature hike, the Roadrunners made nature prints using the items they collected and the power of the sun!

nature

The Roadrunners were able to go on a nature walk through MaCleay Park to help support our study of plants! They collected a bag full of items they found along their way including; pine cones, sticks, flowers, leaves, nuts, moss and seeds. Most of the photos posted were taken by your very own Roadrunner students! Quiz your student on the parts of a plant and their job, as well as the life cycle of a plant...they will impress you with their knowledge!

greetings

September 8, 2009

Hello Roadrunner Families,

Welcome back! We hope everyone got plenty of rest and relaxation over our break! We are excited for the upcoming year and all the fun activities we will be accomplishing. This letter will briefly describe some of our classroom procedures as well as the set up/schedule for this school year.

The Roadrunners class has been split into two groups: The Lions and The Hippos. They will rotate between Mr. Butler and Ms. Crispen in these groups for Math, Science, Writing and Theme.

Homework

Homework this year will go out each Friday and will be due the following Thursday. Your student's homework is designed to be a review of skills that they are currently working on or have previously worked on. It is NOT meant to be challenging, but rather a review. It will include enough work for your student to do a portion each night. Please refrain from doing it all at once. This defeats the goals of teaching your student the work habits that we are trying to instill in them.

Your students have been divided into 4 different reading groups based on their ability level-Dazzling Dinos, Radiant Robots, Sacred Samurai and the Twinkling Transformers. Reading homework will be sent home daily. Inside the front cover will be a yellow sheet, which will include your students name, pages to be read, date and a place for you to initial when they have completed the assignment. There will also be a bag with vocabulary words for your student to review. Please have them spell the words, practice writing them and define them. Please return these books and the vocabulary everyday.

Science and Theme

For the first month of Science and Theme we will be working on building a classroom community and exploring our All About Me Bags. These bags should contain five or six items that tell something about your student. (Example: Ms. Crispen would place a purple crayon to represent her favorite color, a picture of her snowboarding and a necklace to express her favorite hobbies, a photo of her family and a cd of her favorite music.) The class will use these bags to write sentences and stories about each student. Please bring these bags to class ASAP.

We are looking forward to a successful year! Thank you for all your support.

Ms. Crispen and Mr. Butler