Dear Family, November 18, 2009
Well I look forward to seeing some of you on Friday for the Thanksgiving Holiday Meal! We will
be having a longer than normal lunch in the cafeteria from 10:45-11:30, family and friends are
welcome! The cost for adults is $3.50 (CASH ONLY) and students are $1.75 and will be the
traditional Thanksgiving fare. Siblings are welcome to join us, parents need to get them from their
room to join us in the cafeteria. Afterwards, the kids will go directly out to recess.
A gigantic thank you to Amy Patton, Kristen Demeule and Emily Morelli for working the Holiday
Bazaar this past Saturday, we made $50 dollars that is now in our activity fund. If you didn’t come
by to buy your child’s sugar skull, they are $5 in the classroom. We are going to use the money to
pay for a bus in the spring for a zoo field trip.
Behavior has gotten a bit better in the classroom, thank you families for discussing this with
your kiddos. The holidays often bring a lot of excitement to this time of year and kids pick up on
that. With your support, we will settle down, learn and have fun!
PARENT TEACHER CONFERENCES- I scheduled them all! Some reminders- we will have about 20
minutes to discuss your child and the report card. Please bring your questions and concerns and
together we can work on a plan to meet your child’s needs. Your children are welcome to join us
(they know the rules of the classroom!)
• 20 minutes is a short amount of time
• Try to be on time-call me if you are running late as we may need to reschedule!
• Knock as you get here to remind me and the family I am with that you are here for your time (it
may take a minute for us to wrap it up)
• I look forward to talking with all of you!
• Online survey from APS-parents are encouraged to go to the tech lab to fill out a survey about
the conference and school
December 3rd Field trip to “Nutcracker on the Rocks” at National Hispanic Cultural Center- No more
tickets for volunteers ☹. My volunteers are Malay, Damian, Amy, and Kristen. The only lunch order I
have is for Mia, please let me know TOMORROW if you would like a lunch ordered for your child. We
will leave around 11 ish and return 2:30ish. We are taking a school bus to get there, it is a great
dance performance that includes people with disabilities and usually there are some Bandelier
students who are in it. We will read the story and compare the two next week after the play.
What are they going to learn about when they get back from giving thanks, you ask….
Math-We will gather some nuts, count them and graph them. During math time we work on
vocabulary such as most, least, altogether, fewer, more than. We also do a lot of touch counting,
number recognizing, number writing, regrouping as we count, sorting. We may even taste some
nuts and graph which ones we liked best!
Reading- we will work on a Nutcracker book which is written similar to Brown bear, Brown Bear, what
do you see? with a patterned text and recognizing characters from the story. We will work on an
ACE prompt (Which character is your favorite and why?) ACE is a strategy to answering questions and
for reading it stands for Answer, Cite, and Explain. We are just starting this in kinder and they use it
in all grades, we mostly build on introducing the vocabulary and strategy to them in reading and
math.
Science-We will work on a unit about seeds and food sources. See attached Thanksgiving homework
please.
Writing-The writing in this class is amazing, the kids are really taking off and I am super proud!
This past week we worked on a thankful poem and the kids really worked hard on sounding out
words.
Social Studies-We will be working on the upcoming holidays and will focus on Kwanzaa, Hannukah,
Christmas and the New Mexico tradition of Las Posadas. We will learn songs and work on a play to
present to you before we go on the next break.
Thanks for sharing your kiddos with us. I hope you have an amazing break with lots of family time!
Lhasa Lea 228-8759 lea_l@aps.edu
Teacher website- http://teacherweb.com/NM/Bandelier/LhasaLea
