September Newsletter

Pleasant Hill Intermediate School

1204 E. 163rd Street

Pleasant Hill, MO  64080

816-540-3156

September 2011

Important Dates Sept. 2 & 5: No School (Labor Day Weekend) Sept. 7:  PTO Fundraiser Kickoff Sept. 16: 3 Hour Early Release (Professional Development) Oct. 4:  Picture Retakes Oct. 7: 3 Hour Early Release (Homecoming) Oct. 11:  5th Grade PTO Performance Oct. 14: 3 Hour Early Release (work day); End of 1st Quarter Oct. 18 & 19: Parent-Teacher Conferences

5B TEAM NEWSLETTER

Rooster Time for this Week:
We have begun working on class books in rooster time.  We are going to be doing small groups and working on expectations of Rooster time.  We may be doing some cross team switching with small groups during this time.

School and Class Expectations:
We have been working with the students on school wide and classroom expectations.  Some students still need some general reminders about having all of their materials prepared for class.  We are still working very hard on traveling to and from lunch.  Some students are still needing extra encouragement when it comes to lunch room behaviors, such as pushing in chairs and cleaning up their areas.  It is encouraged to discuss these positive behaviors at home!  



Conference Sign-ups:
If you were unable to attend meet the teacher night, please contact Mrs. Murray either by phone or email so that we can sign you and your student up for parent teacher conferences.  

Planners:  Planners are a great organizational tool for students and a great communication tool for parents. Students are expected to fill out their planner in each core class daily (listing assignments, due dates etc.) and take them home daily. Teachers will sign planners for each class and sometimes may write an important note. We will do periodic planner checks throughout the year spot checking to see if planners are being utilized in this manner. Students may receive a small reward for having a filled out and signed planner (signed by the teacher). Parents are not required to sign planners.

Science-Social Studies--Mr. Haight
Social Studies ------
We are studying Native American cultures by region.  We will be testing in two weeks over the Native American cultures.  They will then produce a power point on a Native American tribe.

Science -----
We are finishing chapter one on classification.  The test will be in two weeks.  After that we will be studying cells and cell structure.

Math--Mrs. Lucht
Math Club started this week on August 30th and we will have math club every Tuesday and Wednesday morning at 7:25 a.m.-7:55 a.m.  We will be eating donuts and doing math.  I would love any parents who would bring a cheap bag of donuts to help with this.  If your student is struggling with homework in math, they can come to math club.  Also, on Thursdays after school there will be homework club in Ms. Bradley’s room down the sixth grade hallway.   Thursdays is Accelerated Math day and students have a whole period to work on AM.  Also note that they can work on practices on Ren -Learn on line. Fridays we do learning centers in the classroom and there is homework called writing about math. We just finished a foldable of whole numbers and decimals to the thousandths.   If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me at school.

Communication Arts--Mrs. Murray
We will be spending the two next short weeks on Tall Tales.  The students are becoming familiar with the procedures in the communication arts class such as class small groups, homework (which will be due on Thursdays and will include grammar and spelling), classwork, and vocabulary day.  It feels as if the students have taken tons of assessments thus far, however we still have one fall district test left and that is the Discovery Education test.  We will be taking this on September 8.  This will be our baseline data for this test.  We will have quarterly STAR tests that will aid in adjusting the students’ reading levels.  We will also be testing Discovery Education 2 other times before we have the MAP in the spring.

Ms. Love’s News---
Math
 Students will review numbers and operations.  There will be a focus on word problems.  Students will look key words or phrases to indicate what operation(s) to be used.  We started AM and students have caught on and seem to enjoy it.

Communication Arts
 Students are working on various language skills.  This includes synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms.  Students are using guided reading sets and literature responses.  For example,  students created wanted posters and masks for various characters in the book.  Students have requested to continue this process with other books.  We also worked on descriptive paragraphs.

Rooster Time
      We are working on 2 different books.  We are working on listening skills with the books The Day No Pigs Would Die with the 6th grade and The Strange Case of Origami Yoda with the 5th grade.

Mrs. Meyer’s News-
In communication arts, we will be working on Tall Tales along with story elements.  We will be working on parts of speech and writing descriptive paragraphs.
In math we will be working on subtraction, place value, word problems, time and money.