#WEareBALTZ
Believing, Achieving, Learning, & Team Building with Zeal
November 2019 Baltz Bear News!
Happy Fall Baltz Families,
Can you believe it is already November? As we wrap up the first marking period, we want to reach out and thank so many of our families for becoming actively involved in the Baltz Community. It was so nice to see so many families at Trunk or Treat, our BPO Meetings, and the Red Clay Resource Fair.
November is set to be a busy month with a lot of fun activities, our parent/teacher conferences, and Thanksgiving Break!
We are looking forward to continuing our partnership as a school community. We know that working together is the best way to help our students be as successful as possible.
Ms. O'Neill and Mrs. Palma
For Spanish, go to the bottom and click translate.
Para español, vaya a la parte inferior y haga clic en traducer.
Upcoming Baltz Important Dates!
Tuesday 11/5 - BPO Meeting 6pm
Thursday 11/7 - PBS Family Night
Friday 11/8 - NUT DAY (no uniforms today!)
Monday 11/11 - No School for Students
Tuesday 11/12 - Picture Day Make Up Day
Wednesday 11/13 - BALTZgiving Event 6 pm
Monday 11/25 to 11/29 - No School for Students
Monday 11/25 to 11/26 - Parent/Teacher Conferences
Take a peek into our classrooms with monthly grade level news!
Kindergarten News!
Our newest Kindergarten class has adjusted well to joining their new classroom in Room 114 with Miss Gotthold! They are already getting their classroom procedures in order and becoming their own new community.
Kindergarten has been working hard learning some letters and beginning sounds of words, starting some rhyme practice, and gaining new sight words each week. They are working on reading skills such as identifying characters, the setting of our stories, and the sequence of events in each story. In Math, they have been working hard identifying numbers 1-10 and being able to show these groups of numbers in different ways using manipulatives and drawings. They have also started diving into early beginning addition skills as well. In Science, they have started the Trees Unit which focuses on the parts of a tree and how they grow and change as well as what they need to live. This first couple months have shown great growth in our little learners.
Please continue to check your child’s blue folder each day for any important news or information we may send home!
Thank you for sharing your learner with us,
Mrs. Lou, Mrs. Sedar, Mrs. Scott, Mrs. Burkardt, and Miss Gotthold
Friendly First Graders!
We have been turning into great kindness experts and super hard workers in first grade! First grade had a great time with “It Starts With Hello” week; it helped us build our classroom communities even more. We were working hard on our expectations and have gotten into our routines during the school day with centers. We are continuing with short vowel review and now getting into blends and diagraphs to become even better readers. In Math, students are learning different strategies to solve and write equations. Science is starting up and boy we are excited! We will be learning all about the weather and what it means to be a meteorologist. For updates on what is happening in the first grade classrooms, follow the first grade teacher's twitter accounts:
Miss Trate- @MissTrate
Mrs. Campanella- @MrsCampanella_
Miss Flowers- @Miss_Flowers109
Miss Dale- @miss_dale
Second Grade Rocks!
Second graders are diving deep into academics this month! We have a new curriculum this year and we are loving all of the new stories. We are getting so much better at digging through our text for evidence to understand characters and their points of view. We just read "Trouble at the Sandbox" and now we are reading "Friends Around the World". We are learning a lot about new places and their communities. Please continue reading at home with your students. Be sure to keep plenty of reading materials at home: books, magazines, newspapers, and comic books. Students love to choose from a variety of reading materials. Please contact us if you are in need of extra reading materials at home.
In math, we are continuing to build our fact fluency adding and subtracting numbers within twenty. Continue to practice at home using addition and subtraction flashcards. We have started solving simple and complex word problems. It's been really fun breaking down each step and using all the different strategies we learned to problem solve. Soon we will start working with place value and working through word problems with larger numbers. 2nd grade is full of mathematicians!
Contact Us!
Odette Fuentes - odette.fuentes@redclay.k12.de.us
Jeanine Mauchin - jeanine.mauchin@redclay.k12.de.us
Karen O'Brien - karen.obrien@redclay.k12.de.us
Andrea Simmons - andrea.simmons@redclay.k12.de.us
Terrific in Third Grade!
Fall is here and we are leaving the “get to know you” behind and getting to work! In Math, we are continuing our work with multiplication and division. We just learned the 3’s and 4’s and introduced the concept of finding the area of a shape, which you may have seen on your child’s homework. That will continue to be a focus as we move forward, along with word problems. One of our biggest focuses all year in math will be solving word problems, with the most important skill being correctly choosing what operation to use: add, subtract, multiply, or divide. We just took our first big unit test in Math and are now moving on to Unit 2.
In Reading, we have almost finished our first chapter book of the year. We are continuing to focus on how to describe characters and how they and their actions can affect a story. If you are reading at home with your child some sample questions you could ask after you read that tie in with what we’re doing in class would be: why do you think the character did ______, what are some words you could use to describe that character, and what do you think the character will do next, now that the story has ended? Thank you for all of your help and support so far this year . If you ever have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact us!
Sincerely,
The Third Grade Team
Fall into Success in Fourth Grade!
The leaves aren't the only thing changing this fall! Fourth grade is in the midsts of changing gears and ready to begin learning some fun and exciting things. In ELA, we have wrapped up learning about how the Science Squad, in Porpoises in Peril, was able to solve the problem of the disappearing porpoises. We also just finished finding out how Mary Anning cracked open the world with her discoveries of new and never seen before dinosaur bones. We will still continue to look at the different habits that scientists and researchers use to help them in their discoveries by including a story about Frogs, and even start to do our own research in preparation for the biography our students will be writing on a famous inventor!
In Math, we finished up Unit 1 on place value and multi-digit addition and subtracting and will be diving into multiplication and division. It is EXTREMELY important for our fourth graders to review their multiplication tables each night before going to bed. The better they are at their multiplication and division facts, the easier it will be for them to succeed.
On a side note, with the weather changing please be sure to watch the weather and dress your child accordingly. We go outside for recess everyday, unless it’s raining, and want to make sure they are warm if it is chilly. Also, just a reminder, sweatshirts or sweaters should NOT have hood and should be solid in color. The only printed sweatshirts allowed are the Baltz BPO sweatshirts that are sold at monthly events.
Lastly, DON’T FORGET! Parent teacher conferences will take place on Monday, November 25th, and Tuesday, November 26th. Each teacher will send home specific times that they will hold conferences. It is expected that each teacher meet with every family to ensure that we are all on the same page and continue to have open communication.
Please feel free to contact your child’s teacher for any further questions or concerns!
Sincerely,
Ms. Joanna Toto, Ms. Christina Personti, Ms. Brianna Ruiz, Ms. Amanda Bestwick, and Ms. Erin Czulewicz
Fifth Grade Moving Forward!
Fifth graders are actively learning each day. In math, we have been working on adding and subtracting fractions and finding common denominators. Next, in Chapter 2, we will be learning about decimals. "Night of the Spadefoot Toad" is the novel we are digging into and reading together. This creates a great cross curricular connection that goes along with our Science unit on Ecosystems.
All classes just finished up with the "Biome in a Box" and we were thrilled to see how so many students put so much hard work and effort into these.
Lastly, we are studying about the Bill of Rights in Social Studies. Like stated above, "fifth graders are actively learning" and continuing to grow towards being middle school ready!
Happy Fall, The 5th grade team Ms. Galloway, Mrs. Munoz, Mrs. Klink, Mrs. Loughrey, Mrs. Watkins