Mary Lynch Newsletter
December 2022
Upcoming Dates To Remember
Thursday, December 22nd through Wednesday, January 4th - Christmas Break
In the Classroom
Pre-K
This year Pre-K will be performing with the rest of the elementary at the Christmas Program! We will kick off the program with three short songs for you to enjoy.
Lunch Bag Trees
Grocery List
YEAH Puzzles!!
Junior Kindergarten
Please make sure that your child have snow boots,(when we have snow on the ground) shoes to change into, a winter coat, a hat and mittens. Thank you.
Kindergarten
Kindergarten Update:
Kindergarten has been and will continue learning about things back then, things now, and how they have changed over time through the stories we are reading. Students are practicing writing sentences focusing on capitalization and punctuation. We are learning how to subtract numbers within 10 and will move into identifying and writing numbers 11-20 soon. We are working hard this month to be kind in order to grow the Grinch's heart for Christmas!
Upcoming Events:
Dec. 20th - Christmas Movie @ The Goodhand
Dec. 20th - Christmas Concert @ 6:00 p.m.
Dec. 21st - End of 2nd Quarter/1st Semester
Below are some pictures from our Family Challenge and or our Grinch.
Working on the Family Challenge.
Filling the Grinch's Heart
Working on the Family Challenge.
1st Grade
In Math, we are learning about true and false equations. In math, we are going to be working on counting to 120.
The month of December is a busy month and we have a lot planned. Please keep track of your students; calendars in their folders so you can stay updated. If there are any changes or alterations, we will let you know as soon as we know.
We would like to remind parents that the students have to have snow boots in order to go into the snow. Dress boots or cowboy boots would not count for this rule. With the snow being so compact, we are all concerned about slipping and falling so if your student has snow boots, please send them to school!
2nd Grade
In Reading, we have been working on text and graphic features and prefixes. We will be moving into suffixes and author's purpose.
In writing, we have been working on informational paragraphs. We are now working on writing friendly letters.
In Social Studies, we have been talking about American Symbols. We will be talking about holidays and traditions.
In Science, we have been talking about how Earth changes. We will be talking about the properties of matter.
Behaviors- excited for Christmas.
Looking forward to going to the movie and the Christmas program.
Please check the weather and remind your child to dress appropriately.
The lost and found has grown since the change in weather. If your child is missing anything, please have them check the lost and found.
Please read with your children and practice math facts at home.
3rd Grade
3rd Grade has been busy with Rocket Math, learning how to address a letter, adding three digit numbers and continually trying to increase our multiplication math fact fluency!!
We are trying to increase our reading comprehension skills by summarizing what we read each day out of our library books too! We are also working hard to increase the number of words we read per minute by completing our daily 6-minute solutions!
We had a fun Oreo Challenge this month and Breckin Wise was the 3rd Grade winner! We are looking forward to all the holiday festivities!
4th Grade
The fourth through sixth grade language arts students have decreased their reading a bit lately. I would like to remind parents that dark winter evenings are the perfect time to catch up on some reading minutes as a family! Here is a link to stories that are geared for younger children. Children's Holiday Stories
Students should be bringing home their reading book and reading each evening. This is a class assignment. I check their reading progress and page number of the book they are reading in class. Students also have library time each week to select and check out books, so please ask your child what they are reading and expect them to have their book at home for quiet reading time.
The fourth graders have been working diligently on long division and are moving on to factors and multiples. Fifth grade has been working on computing all operations with decimals, and if they are not already will be working with fractions with unlike denominators. This often causes a lot of frustration for students, so please encourage them to persevere and use their knowledge to work through what they do not know.
Our math classroom is shifting to become much more of a "thinking classroom" based on the research of Peter Liljedahl. Your student may talk about different things that help promote more student thinking and less student mimicking. One aspect of this pertains to different question types. Students will ask teachers proximity questions, stop-thinking-questions, and keep-thinking questions. As a teacher, I am becoming much more deliberate about the types of questions that I will answer for students to ensure that they push themselves to think deeper and try new things, rather than depend upon me to guide them to the answer. So, if they come home and tell you I refused to answer a question or help them there is a very real possibility that I did just that. If you are ever unsure about if this is why, please reach out to me and we can talk about what is happening.
4th Grade Math
5th Grade
The fifth grade language arts students have decreased their reading a bit lately. I would like to remind parents that dark winter evenings are the perfect time to catch up on some reading minutes as a family! Here is a link to stories that are geared for younger children. Children's Holiday Stories
Students should be bringing home their reading book and reading each evening. This is a class assignment. I check their reading progress and page number of the book they are reading in class. Students also have library time each week to select and check out books, so please ask your child what they are reading and expect them to have their book at home for quiet reading time
5th Grade Math
6th Grade
The sixth grade language arts students have decreased their reading a bit lately. I would like to remind parents that dark winter evenings are the perfect time to catch up on some reading minutes as a family! Here is a link to stories that are geared for younger children. Children's Holiday Stories
Students should be bringing home their reading book and reading each evening. This is a class assignment. I check their reading progress and page number of the book they are reading in class. Students also have library time each week to select and check out books, so please ask your child what they are reading and expect them to have their book at home for quiet reading time
Library
Thank you for all of your support at our annual fall book fair. With the Scholastic Dollars that are earned from the sales, our school is able to purchase books for not only the library but the classrooms too. The extremely generous donations to the Longhorns for Literacy project enabled 66 Mary Lynch students to purchase their own books to take home. Thank you to the community members who donated, your generosity is appreciated!
Physical Education
Art
Lion
Shark
Elite
Happy Holidays from the team at ELITE!
Some of the highlights from our busy month of November include:
STEM club: Longest paper chain challenge, walking robot toys, and the roller coaster challenge.
Cooking club: Pigs in a blanket.
Science club: Spider lesson from Ms. Amanda/Wildcat Hills Nature Center, and dancing popcorn!
Art/Craft club: Thankful trees, shape turkeys, and scarecrows.
November 8th was National STEM day: our challenge was Toothpick towers!
Game club: Uno, Phase 10, memory, yahtzee.
For the month of December we have started Lego club, and we will be doing xmas art projects, STEM activities, making cookies, sugar cone trees and we will have another lesson with Ms. Amanda!
Have a Merry Xmas, and Happy New Year from all of us at ELITE!
Please feel free to contact me with any questions, concerns, or ideas!
Thank you for letting us have fun with your kids!
Marcie and the Elite team - Julie,Trista, Barbi, Kristen, Ashley
Legendary Longhorn
For Kindergarten we would like to nominate Kaci Markum and Collette DeWeese for this month. These girls are great helpers to their peers and teachers. They both have positive attitudes and are hard workers in all that they do. We are proud of how they show their classmates the Longhorn Way. Keep up the great work! :)
In the Second Grade Kyra and Kira are hardworking and kind to others. They are setting great examples and leading the way in the Longhorn Way. Keep up the great work, 2nd graders!!!