November 3, 2025

Dear Parents,

          It’s hard to believe we have been in school for 2 months! Thank you to our room parents Mrs. Tamika Francis and Mrs. China Sheffield for organizing our Harvest Crafts. Thank you also to Mrs. Davidson, Mrs. Curry and Mrs. Akinci for coming in and helping out. We had a fantastic day listening to We’re Going on a Leaf Hunt, creating fall puppets, making friendship bracelets/necklaces, creating a scratch picture and playing Fall Bingo! The children had a wonderful time! Thank you SO much for all of the classroom donations of wipes and tissues! At this time of year we are always in need of tissues.

          During reading, the students are reading decodable stories, practicing heart words, talking about characters, setting and retelling stories with a beginning, middle and end. We are also continuing with small group instruction, independent reading, and partner reading. 

          During writing the children are being introduced to writing routines for Writer’s Workshop. We are also continuing to identify complete sentences vs sentence fragments. They will learn a new writing organizer with the acronym TIDE. For the T, the students come up with a Topic Sentence. The I stands for Important Information. The D stands for Detail or Tell More about the important information. This is repeated 3 times. (T-ID-ID-ID-E) Finally, the E stands for the Ending where they restate their topic sentence. They have been working really hard to write in complete sentences with “uppercase, finger space and punctuation.” Ask them to show you the movements that go along with that phrase.

          For our math we are beginning Unit 4 titled: Addition within 20: Facts and Strategies.  The strategies taught include doubles, near doubles, doubles plus 2 and making a 10 to add. Refer to the Open House Important References and the overview that was sent home last week for further explanation. This month we will also begin our 5th unit titled: Subtraction within 20: Facts and Strategies. 

          We are going strong with our UFLI Phonics program. Ask your child to sing the UFLI jingle. Please make sure your child is doing the word work practice that is sent home at the beginning of each week. The directions are printed on the back.

          Remember every child needs to be reading, doing the UFLI word practice and practicing their addition and subtraction math facts to 20.  Please remind your child to make sure to return their homework log each Friday and bring in their yellow homework folder each day. 

          Conferences are scheduled for the afternoon of Wednesday, Nov. 19th and the evening of Thursday, Nov. 20th. I will be using Sign-Up Genius to schedule conferences. You will be receiving a Sign-Up Genius email invite shortly.  

          We are having a great time learning! If you have any questions or concerns, please give me a call and we can discuss them. Hope all is well. I am looking forward to meeting with you all and discussing your child’s progress! See you soon.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Gaspa