St. Christopher School

As we welcome the New Year, we realize that the class of 2012 has finally reached their year.  It won’t be long before they are promoted.  Keep the tissues handy!

January is filled with many activities that will keep us busy all month long.  We have our Open House mass on Sunday, January 8^th to help us start our month off on the right foot.  We will close the month with our Catholic School’s Week (CSW) mass on January 30^th.  6E will prepare the CSW mass with our buddy class, 1M.  6E has the important role of guiding 1M through the presentation of the mass.  This will be their very first mass.  We are also collecting items for Corpus Christi as a service project for CSW.

Weekly Spelling Lessons this month include 15, 16, 17 and 18.    They are all on www.spellingcity.com except for 18, which consists of lessons 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17.  Along with our weekly spelling lessons, students will participate in mini-spelling bees to earn a spot in the school spelling bee, which will be held on the Monday, January 30^th.

In Religion we look forward to another visit from Sr. Marilyn, our adopted sister, on the 4^th.  During her last visit, she shared pictures of her trip to World Youth Day which took place over the summer in Spain.  We have also started the annual Catholic Daughter’s Contest.  Every year students from grades 4 through 6^th participate in a contest and create works of art, poems or essays.  The students in 6E are creating illustrations.  We usually have several local winners from St. Chris.  All work for the contest must be done in school.  We continue to study the Israelites and their early leaders.

In Math Miss Cooper, our student teacher, is wrapping up her last few days with us.  The fifth grade is doing a unit on various graphs, statistics, and data.  Then they will start their decimal unit.  They will begin the unit with decimal sense and place value and finish it with adding and subtracting decimals.

The sixth grade is finishing their first of three fraction units.  They have been working on fraction sense, greatest common factors, least common multiples, simplifying, and divisibility rules.  They will be comparing, ordering, and relating fractions to decimals.  Their second fraction unit involves adding and subtracting fractions and mixed fractions.

Our January book report genre is Historical Fiction.  We will have a “story quilt” book report at the end of the month.  The book is read at home, but the report is completed in school.  We continue reading our weekly stories from our literature series.  Lob’s Girl, Amitabh, The Ch’i-lin Purse, and Thunder Butter are our selections this month.  We read the stories in class, have class discussions throughout the week, and take a test every Friday.  I highly encourage the students to reread the selection Thursday night just to keep it fresh in their minds.

Skiing starts this month for those who signed up.  Here’s hoping for a mountain covered with snow!

Happy New Year!  Let’s hope 2012 is as great as 2011!