FES Points of P.R.I.D.E. Newsletter

Brrrr....It may be cold outside, but FES is heating up with winter happenings!

We started our week welcoming Mr. LeGraw back for fun in Wellness, then continued through the week with growing our reading skills, and digging deep with measurement in math! It has been a short, yet busy and productive week at F.E.S.!

Thank you to our families who joined us for our P.R.I.D.E. Day celebration, where the K-1 students presented their recent accomplishments in writing. It was wonderful to see all the families that could attend the assembly, and afterward were able to walk through the student presentations. The students worked hard, and their work shows it. We are so proud of our beginning learners and first-grade superstar writers!

A friendly reminder for students to come with warm clothing, including snow pants, for outdoor recess and activities. Students will not go out if the "feel-like" temperature is below 10 degrees, including the wind chill, and they have expressed their disappointment to me every lunchtime that they cannot go outside. The snow piles look so inviting, and I do not blame them a bit! We will be ready when the temperature cooperates, so watch for fun outdoor photos soon!

Another important reminder is about attendance. It is expected that your child is at school every school day, and ready to take part in all the wonderful learning opportunities F.E.S. offers our children. Student attendance is the responsibility of the parents/guardians and students. While absences due to illness or other reasons are sometimes unavoidable, parents/guardians are encouraged to make every effort to minimize unnecessary student absences. To assist parents or guardians in fulfilling this responsibility, we will inform you of excessive absences if they occur. Please see policy JH-Attendance, Absenteeism, and Truancy.

Lastly, please see below information for the district deliberative session. We hope to see you there! Stay well, take good care of yourselves and your families, and thank you for your support and partnership.

Warmest regards,

Kathie

• Next Week's Special: Art with Mr. Melle
• 2/3 Deliberative Session 6pm @ CVHS Gym
• 2/9-2/13 Special of the week is PE & Wellness with Mr. LeGraw
• 2/17 Kindergarten Registration & Screening (see flier below for more info)
• 2/19 Morphs & Milestones visits FES
• 2/20 February P.R.I.D.E. Meeting & Community Lunch
• 2/23-2/27 Winter Recess - No School
• Coming soon! March Read-a-thon information and more events!

Ms. Flanagan's class was busy this week getting ready for the P.R.I.D.E. meeting. We learned about brown bears and hibernation. We have wrapped our informational writing unit. We will move on to personal narrative after February Break. In Math, we are reviewing place value. In Reading, comprehension is still a key skill. 1st grade is learning about vowel teams and r-controlled vowels. Kindergarten continues to blend CVC words and are moving on to consonant clusters.

Our 1-2 Team has deepened their math fluency skills and is ready to take on two new math units! Grade 2 will continue to review our skills in composing and decomposing numbers, but will begin learning about numbers to 1,000, place value, and expanded number forms. Grade 1 students are ending their learning with adding and subtracting fluently within 20, and will begin Unit 4 to learn about different representations of tens and ones and learning to make number comparisons. They are always excited to learn more and be challenged!

With regard to reading, please be on the lookout for some home-school packets or books for practicing skills at home. Students were (fairly!) excited to learn that my goal is to have them work on nightly reading that aligns with the skills they are working on in small reading groups with me. This skill practice will not be required, although I am strongly encouraging it. It is the key that opens the door to becoming a fluent reader who is able to comprehend text. The harder it is for a student to decode (sound out) words, the harder it is to build comprehension. Our goal is to free up that effort and make reading an enjoyable journey.

This week, fourth grade students wrapped up a math unit focused on adding and subtracting numbers in the hundred-thousands place value. They will be moving on to Unit 5, Multiplicative Comparison and Measurement. Third grade students are learning how to multiply two digit numbers by breaking them into smaller factors. In Social Studies, students are exploring the seven regions of New Hampshire and discussing places they would like to travel. We have officially completed our Poetry Unit and are excited to begin our next unit, which includes reading the novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

This week in PE, we completed our second PACER test of the year and it went great! The students have been working really hard during class, and they increased their score on the test by an average of 2.3 levels! We also continued to work on our fitness and agility with some fun activities. It was a fun week!