November Newsletter

Pleasant Hill Intermediate School

1204 E. 163rd Street

Pleasant Hill, MO  64080

816-540-3156

November 2011

Important Dates Nov 4 - No School - Professional Development Nov 8 - BMX Bike/Bully Assembly DARE final copies due! Nov 16 -  Mid-Terms Nov 22- Reader’s Theatre Program during Rooster time Nov 23-25 - Thanksgiving Break

5B TEAM NEWSLETTER

Rooster Time for November:
We will begin working on Reader’s Theatre in class.  The students will be performing these on November 22, at 2:30 in their Rooster time classes.  They will have either a social studies/historical theme or be related to harvest.  Parents and grandparents are invited to attend the performance.

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 and for turning their voices off during class and in the lunch room.  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!  


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.

AR/AM Students will need 10 AR points for the quarter and 5 AM tests.  To help your student pace these out, we suggest 1-2 points a week and 1 AM test a week to get the points at an even pace, instead of rushing at the very end of the quarter.  This helps promote good planning ahead skills.  The students may do AM practice at home at the Renaissance Learning website.  If you still need more information about this, contact your student’s homeroom teacher or Mrs. Lucht, math teacher.

Science-Social Studies--Mr. Haight
Social Studies --
In social studies,  we will be finishing up with early explorers and settlements.  We will test on ch. 5 next week also.  We then will look at the founding of the thirteen original colonies.  We will look at their economies, culture, and the people who founded them.

Science --
In Science we will be finishing up our studies of human body systems and will test over ch. 2&3 next week.  Our next unit of study will be over plants, their systems, and reproduction.

Math--Mrs. Lucht
Lucht Math Class is heavy into long division.  We are learning Divide, Multiply, Subtract, Bring Down, and check.  We also check as we are doing our problem.  We also learned how to do it horizontally with short division.  Some of the students like having a choice. Thank you for all the help you are giving your child at home for them to understand the process. We are going to learn a rap this week which will help us remember the steps.  We are getting lots of practice.
Pumpkin Math went very well with many parents helping me.  I want to thank those parents who made our day of studying our pumpkins and doing math such a success.  We did bar graph, line graph, ordered pairs to create a pumpkin picture, weighing, measuring height, writing an article, drawing a picture. Etc.  I know many of you baked pumpkin seeds.  We really had a great day of learning.
Thanks for all you do.  Let me know if you have any concerns.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Lucht






Communication Arts--Mrs. Murray
In communication arts, we will be working on building better vocabulary skills using some daily dictionary/thesaurus skills.  We will also be working on Unit 2 weeks 4 and 5 and then will have a review week and a Unit common assessment.  Starting Unit 3, we will begin doing some layered curriculum activities which will give the students some choice on their assignments.  We still have spelling homework weekly that includes vocabulary skills, writing skills, and proofreading and checking grammar.      These are passed out on Tuesday and should be completed and turned in on Thursday, unless there is no school on Friday and then they will be passed out on Monday and due on Wednesday.



Ms. Love’s News--

Communication Arts
Discovery Education has an excellent series of videos and activities for developing the writing process. We have utilized various clips to help with the pre-writing process, revising, editing, and publishing.  We learned how to evaluate others work in order to provide positive feedback.  We will continue with this series developing our writing purpose,  knowing our audience, and creating dialogue. We will find out how the use time lines, maps, and pictures that can enhance our writing.  We will use this information to produce our own writings besides analyze others writings.

Math
We are working diligently on developing our skills with decimals.   In our RTI time, we are focusing on some specific areas of Math that Discovery Education testing indicated that we were not as proficient as we needed to be.  This includes geometric constructions, properties of 3 dimensional figures, construction of 2 & 3 dimensional figures, congruence & similarity, and scale.  

Mrs. Meyer’s News--
Mrs. Meyer's class is working on main ideas and supporting details, making inferences, summarizing, and drawing conclusions in communication arts. We are learning about compound and complex sentences and writing paragraphs for different purposes.
In math, we are starting to work on multiplication and division, fractions, money, and measurement. Students should be working toward their 10 AR points for the quarter (that's about one point per week) and getting their AM tests (about one every two weeks).