St. Christopher School

Welcome back from vacation and Happy New Year!  There is a lot planned for this month, and we will be busy, busy, busy!

Before we left for vacation, we had been working on cursive handwriting, and now we are full steam ahead.  Everything done in class and for homework will be written in cursive with a few exceptions. Practicing everyday in our handwriting book, as well as other subjects will reinforce this and make for some beautiful penmanship!

Our English will focus on regular and irregular verbs.  We will practice these in our writing a lot!  Working on sentence structure and proper grammar will continue to be a major component too.

We have completed our chapter on 0-5 in multiplication, so we are switching gears into division.  It should be an easy transition if we know our multiplication facts.  A continuous review of these skills through games and drills in the classroom, as well as the Eno board helps us to remember.  If you want to practice at home, flash cards and Multiplication.com are great tools for learning.

In Religion we will be reviewing The Apostles' Creed and Catholic Social Teaching.  Are we living in the way that Jesus taught us?  Are we kind to one another?  Fair?  Everyday examples will be explored.

Our Social Studies takes us to communities around the United States looking at the different regions, environment, climate, and geographical features.  We are understanding that a place's distance from the equator affects the climate, and learning about our natural resources and why we need to reduce, reuse, recycle, and conserve these resources.  There is a lot of Science in this chapter!

At the end of the month (January 30 - February 3) is Catholic School's Week!  We plan to have a week filled with fun activities that make us deeply appreciate St. Christopher School! Look for more details to follow.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

During this holiday season, there is so much to do!  We had our annual Christmas Shopping for Kids, and as usual, we were very excited to spend our money on some wonderful gifts for our families and friends. Thank you again to all of the super volunteers who helped with this!

We started muliplication this week!  We will have weekly quizzes so the multiplication table should be reviewed nightly.  It will be much easier for the children if these facts are memorized.  We will learn division too while we practice our fact families.  We play games and use the eno board to help with multiplication and division too.

Our bulletin board is all about Advent!  Since this is the time of preparation, we designed our board with the "meaning of Advent."  We are thinking of ways that we can best prepare and what gifts we can give--the TRUE gifts that come from the heart and are shown through our actions.

We are coming to a close on pronouns, and will be beginning verbs in English.  Our writing is improving so much!  Everyday we practice our cursive writing.  Some of us are very excited to start writing everything in cursive, which is coming soon!  Practice makes perfect!

We are finishing up chapter 4 in Social Studies.  Holidays, traditions, festivals, and celebrations across the world have been the focus.  We discussed the first Thanksgiving and wrote about what we thought it would be like with the Pilgrims and Indians.  Some of us wished we could have been there!  We also had a chance to write a "Perfect Thanksgiving Menu."  Some of the classics weren't even mentioned, except cranberry sauce.  The veggies weren't popular either, although we agreed that our modern day Thanksgiving food is much better than some of the items at the first Thanksgiving!

There is a lot going on this month so please take a look at any news that comes home.  3G wishes you and your family a blessed holiday!