Weekly Newsletter

 
October 3, 2008

Dear Fristler Families,

Happy October!!!!  Haven't these cool mornings been wonderful!?!?!?   This week's and next week's 
newsletters will be brief.  The school is participating in on-line benchmark testing and teachers have 
very limited access to the internet (this will be the case for 6 days in each six weeks).

Report cards are coming home on Thursday.  Your child also received an invitation to the team potluck 
scheduled for Thursday night.

Things are good in Language Arts.  Most of the students got their finished pieces in on time.  Another 
novel letter will be due on Thursday.  I will also post a new timeline for next six weeks writing piece.

In social studies I had the most exciting day watching your children!!!  We've spent time this week 
preparing for a trial.  Christopher Columbus, Columbus's men, Ferdinand and Isabella, The System of 
Empire, and the Taino Indians were all on trial for "the mistreatment and murder of thousands of Taino 
Indians."  Your children were brilliant!!!!!  Please ask your child about the outcome of the trial and the 
jury's decision.

In science we are in the first part of our unit on biodiversity and nature.  In this unit we look at the ideas 
of interdependence and how an ecosystem might change over time.  I collected the notebooks 
Wednesday and will return them Monday.  The long awaited watershed project information will come 
after the weekend also.

In both math classes, we will wrap up the statistics and graphing unit next week with a quiz on Friday.  
The math notebooks will also need to be caught up and completed by that day.  We started a review 
packet the past two days and will continue later into next week.

Also for math, there will be a benchmark test on Tuesday.  This is a program within our whole school 
division to measure your children's progress through the math curriculum.  We will have three more of 
these throughout the year.  The kids take them online during our math class.  There isn't any reason to 
worry about this test or be concerned about studying for it.  It also does not count towards any grade.

Have a wonderful weekend.  We hope to see you Thursday night.

Gretchen, Mark, and Stiggy