December 8th-Report cards go home

December 11th-Community Forum with Prismatic, Lucy Hurlin Theater, ConVal High School7:30pm.

December 22nd-half day of school

December 25th-January1st-Winter Recess no school

Good Friday Afternoon DCS Families, it has been a long week after the past two short weeks, but we had a lot of learning and fun going on! Your students should be bringing home their lanterns they made a few weeks ago with Jeannie Connolly to be displayed at the Lantern Parade in Peterborough tomorrow. The set up for the parade will be at noon on Saturday due to the rain predicted for this afternoon. More information can be found below. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, Nicole

Kindergarteners and first graders enjoyed the book Turkey Trouble, a fun story about a turkey disguising itself as a variety of different things in order to avoid becoming Thanksgiving dinner! We followed up with a Turkey in Disguise project that was sent home. Kindergarteners were especially proud to write a whole sentence with heart words they've learned as well as words with letters they know such as "not".

First graders have been learning about light and sound with Emily Primrose, our library media specialist. Ask them what they've learned.

Yesterday we read The Gingerbread Man and will be comparing and contrasting different adaptations of this classic folktale. Coming up: The Gingerbread Pirate and the Gingerbread Girl!

We jumped right back in with both feet after Thanksgiving break! We've been studying the differences between fables, folk tales, and fairy tales, and we've read different versions and compared them using Venn diagrams. It's been so fun to also work on our fluency while using Readers Theaters. Our favorite has been "The Three Billy Goats Gruff." These second-graders have great troll voices! Another strategy to improve fluency is by singing! So we've been learning songs like: "I've Been Working on the Railroad" and "Polly Wolly Doodle." If you listen carefully, you can hear us singing down the hallways while heading to recess, PE, etc. Ask your child to sing for you! Grammar has been a focus and we're busy identifying nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The students are helping to make a class bulletin board with pictures they are taking at home.

We are marching forward in math in our Place value unit, making trades with our place value discs. This is the precursor to adding and subtracting numbers to 1,000. Also, we continue to use Xtramath, and our math facts are improving daily.

Finally, we are doing a great job with Opinion Writing! The students are planning their paragraphs using top-down webs. They're doing a great job supporting their topic sentence with three reasons and then wrapping it up with an ending. They are eager writers!

The Third Grade was super happy to be back in school and busy with a week of special Social Studies and Science projects. For our Social/Emotional Learning, the children practiced their tools to help regulate themselves during unexpected situations and exciting events. The children are progressing nicely and forming a positive 3rd-Grade learning community.

During Language Arts, the children enjoy reading their lines for our Holiday Skit with the 4th/5th grades. For Math, the class is starting their unit to use place value understanding to round whole numbers and add and subtract within 1,000.

We kicked off our study of birds with two visits from the Harris Center. We learned what birds in this area eat during the winter and used our playground to find possible food, shelter, and water for birds. The children enjoyed learning how to use field guides to identify birds and started our data collecting on birds that may visit our bird feeder.

For Social Studies, Jeanne Connelly guided the children in learning about the original small schoolhouses in Dublin, creating beautiful collage pictures.

This last week of November has been full of creativity!

In language arts we are thinking about the holidays. We are reading holiday/winter themed chapter books. We have been writing an opinion piece about if we prefer real or artificial Christmas trees and a narrative about their selected topics.

This has been a great week of building confidence in math as each of the class practiced multiplication with numbers that challenged their understanding of the algorithm.

The students have begun expressing their themselves by creating beautiful art work to decorate our classroom door. We also created a bulletin board that shows what they would look like as an elf.

This week in Wellness students learned about muscular strength endurance, aerobic endurance and flexibility. They played 'Fitnopoly' and performed various exercises matching the above categories. They also played a favorite game 'battleship' that focuses on teamwork (four teams and then two teams) as well as giving it your best effort. We learned a different version of 'battleship' that was totally different and based on the traditional 'board game' and two teams. They loved the new version. Younger students practiced self tossing and catching objects, turtle tag, balancing a pool noodle and scarf, and learned how to ride on the scooters.

Health topics included self-esteem and a growth mindset, how to deal with troublesome feelings, knowing when our body gives us signals about not feeling well and using medicine safely.

I really enjoy the opportunity to work with your children. Thank you for your support!

Note from Ms. Gregg, School Counselor– The holiday season is a time of many emotions. In addition to feelings of anticipation, excitement, and joy, many adults and children also feel stress, anxiety, and disappointment during this time of year. Here at DCS we try to anticipate the full array of feelings our students may experience. We work to keep things calm and low-key and we continue to provide the same routines and support we provide to the children throughout the school year. As always, I welcome communication from you, our students’ families. Please reach out to me and/or your child(ren)’s teacher or other DCS staff members if you wish to share any concerns. I hope that the coming Thanksgiving weekend provides all of you with some quiet moments and a chance to experience feelings of gratitude and thankfulness. I am thankful that I work at DCS as your children’s school counselor!

Email: npease@conval.edu
Website: https://dcs.convalsd.net/
Location: 1177 Main Street, Dublin, NH, USA
Phone: 603-563-8332