May 19, 2014
Dear Families,
Within a month summer vacation will begin and your students
will be headed to fourth grade! It has
been an incredible year, full of learning and fun. It has been a pleasure and an honor to work
with your kids.
Next week we have our field trip downtown, Thursday, May
29. This is a wonderful experience and
caps off our year of studying Portland.
Ms. Crandell’s class had beautiful weather, let’s hope we get as
lucky. I got a lot of offers to
volunteer, I can only take four people with me. I had to put names in a bucket
to choose.
My volunteers will be:
Heather Whiteford, Molly Raimondo, David McLaughlin and
Laura Ehrlich. We will leave at 8:45 and
return before lunch. If you can’t make
it, let me know immediately. I need all
of you.
The end of the year brings many celebrations; the Rose Show,
Field Day and more. But for third
graders the big event is the Coffee House.
This celebration of classroom writing is held during the last hour of the last day of school
–June 13, 2013. Students will share
some of their writing “beatnik” style, dressed in black and snapping fingers
instead of clapping. We’ll turn the room
into a café and set the mood with lights and music. It is a joyful way to end a year!
It has been a pleasure to watch your kids grow and
learn. I can really see this in their
novel studies. Each of the groups is
taking their responsibilities seriously and are working together. We’ve also begun a Storyline (remember the
Henry Huggins Storyline at the beginning of the year?) This one is science based, looking at plants
and cycles. We are building a nursery
and stocking it with flowers, fountains, trees and other plants –all out of
painted paper! Stop by and see this
garden grow!
We have just completed our “I Am From” poems-amazing! I’ll
post them in hall this week. Now, we
are working on color poems, using Molly O”Neill’s book, Hailstones and
Halibut Bones as a mentor text. It’s
fun.
Thanks for all you.
Valerie McKenzie
