News and Notes 10/31

News and Notes

From Fourth Grade

Spooky!

In case your fourth grader has not been overflowing with excitement at home, we just wanted to remind everyone that Halloween is this week!  The fourth graders were so full of enthusiasm for this, one of their favorite times of the school year.  In honor of the fun and silliness of this season, we took some time this week to integrate festivity into our learning.  We solved math problems relating to ghosts and goblins, we used our reading skills of inferencing to solve the mystery of what is hiding in "the dark", and on Friday we put on costumes and participated in the annual Halloween parade in downtown Warner.  These simple ways of integrating fun into our normal routines made for a particularly enjoyable and exciting week of learning in fourth grade!

Endings and Conferences

Although it's hard to believe, we have reached the end of the first quarter.  This means that grades have closed for the fourth graders and next Friday we will be sending home report cards to share with families the progress that their children have been making.  In addition to the quarterly report cards, during this first quarter we also ask that all families come to school for a conference.  Most of our conferences for fourth grade will be held before and after school during the week of November 10-14.   If you have not yet signed up for a conference, please make sure to do so as soon as possible!  It's such a great opportunity to close out the first quarter by sharing all that has been going on with your fourth graders.  Thank you for taking the time and effort to be involved in this important part of the school-home partnership!

Snow

Living in New Hampshire brings with it some commonly accepted realities.  In the fall the leaves will change, in the spring rain showers will come, and in the winter we will have snow and hail and wind and freezing temperatures and blizzard-like weather of varying degrees.  For those who love skiing and sledding and snowmen, winter is a wonderful time of year.  It certainly holds special appeal for many of us.  For schools however, winter travel is a difficult and potentially dangerous challenge.  Therefore we invented the snow day.  The problem with the traditional snow day was the fact that at the end of June neither child nor family nor teacher was keen on adding on additional days when learning in the classroom was so unappealing and summer vacation felt so very close.  In recent years the Kearsarge District has developed an alternative plan to snow days: Blizzard Bags.  Coming home this week is the 2014-2015 fourth grade Blizzard Bag.  This is work that students are meant to do at home when we have an official "Blizzard Bag Day."  Please be sure to ask if you have any questions or concerns regarding the format and procedures for Blizzard Bags in fourth grade!