Dear Families,
I am so sorry for the delay with our classroom website. I figured out what the problem was...finally! :) We all have a very busy and fun next couple of weeks. Please refer to the home page for specific dates and activities coming up. Thank you! It was so great to see so many of you at our music assembly. The students all did such a wonderful job and they were so excited to see you in the audience. I also hope you all enjoyed a wonderful Mother's Day surrounded by family. This will be my last classroom update on our website. I will definitely continue to email you with specific dates/information as needed I wanted to take a quick minute to thank all of you for a wonderful last school year. I will be retiring after teaching for 30 years. I look forward to spending more time with my 3 beautiful grandchildren and my aging parents. Though I am looking forward to more free time, I am also feeling sad about the end of my teaching career. But I have to tell you, to have this particular classroom of wonderful boys and girls for my final class, I could not be any luckier. They are amazing children with amazing, supportive families. They are sweet, hard working, and so excited to come to school every day. I have loved every moment of teaching your children this year. Thank you!!! I will continue updating you in the next several weeks, but I just wanted to take a minute now to thank all of you. Have a great week! Sincerely, Linda
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Dear Families,
I hope you are all doing well. I wanted to remind you about our student-led teacher/family conferences this Thursday evening and Friday. If you have already signed up, thank you. If you haven't signed up yet and wanted to, please do so at your earliest convenience. Thank you! The students will be the leaders at these conferences. We have been working on our conference books at school so they can share all about their days at Willow Grove with you. If you are unable to attend, no problem. Your children will still be completing books at school and they can share these with you at home. This week we will be having a spirit week (March 20-March 23). Your child is welcome to participate, but of course it is not mandatory. Here are the planned days: March 20- Willow Grove Spirit Day! Wear purple, gray and/or blue March 21- Hat Day March 22- Class Animal or Class Color Day (Penguins/Blue) March 23- Dress Fancy Day (sensible shoes, please) I wanted to wish you all a wonderful spring break. Enjoy family, friends and fun. Take care! Sincerely, Linda Dear Families,
I am sorry for the delay in sending this out. I hope you are all doing well and enjoying the tiny little signs of spring. The Penguins are rolling right along in February. Report cards will go live on Friday, March 3rd. You will be receiving a district message with directions on how to access your child's report card. They will be going live at 3:00 PM. We have been busy checking in on our trimester 2 targets. You should be seeing rubrics coming home in your child's take home folder. Our class has filled up our snowball jar again, so we will decide, as a class, what our celebration will be. :) Way to go, Penguins! I wanted to send a reminder to you regarding your child doing Lexia and Countdown at home. At the beginning of the year, we asked for just small amounts of time on these apps at home. Now that we are heading into March, I think more time on these at home would be a good idea. They are both language based apps that go right along with our Countdown foundational skills program. Thank you for your help with this. I have also noticed many of the students' iPads are reaching the storage limits. I am asking that students delete many pictures videos,...from their iPads. I can't spend time doing this at school, so if you could please help your child delete many of these things from their iPads at home, that would be a great help. Thank you! We will be having our student led family/educator conferences on March 23 and March 24. Each student will be creating a book to share with you during the conference. This will include things that we have been working on in school, things they are proud of,...The district will be communicating information regarding these conferences including a sign up. Please keep in mind that your child needs to come with you to the conference when you sign up. Thank you! This is always such a great conference because the students are leading it out. :) Have a wonderful weekend and I hope you are all doing well. Take care! Sincerely, Linda Dear Families,
I hope you are all doing well. The Penguins have been very busy since coming back from winter break. In literacy we just finished reading "A Ticket Around the World". It is an informational text about growing up in different countries. The students were excited to see where we were going to "travel" each day. We practiced answering questions about the text and using complete sentences to do so. We are also continuing our work on heart words and reading CVC words during our Countdown lessons. In math, we have been working on specific strategies used to solve both addition and subtraction problems. It is important for the students to be able to explain how they solve addition and subtraction problems. We are going to be starting a new unit about geometric shapes. On Friday, February 3rd, we will be celebrating our 100th Day of Kindergarten! Our celebration includes a rotation of special activities during an extended math time. I need 4 parent volunteers to help run this special day. You would need to be here from approximately 11:00-11:45am, and each parent will be assigned an activity center, planned by me. Since you will be running an activity, we will not be able to accommodate younger siblings. If you are interested, please email me and I will put all the names into a lottery and let you know if you have been chosen. Please let me know if you are interested by Friday, January 27th. Thank you so much! If we have a snow day ON February 3rd, we will then celebrate 100’s day the next open day of school. Please respond in your email if you can accommodate for this back-up plan. We will be celebrating Valentine's Day on Monday, February 13th We will have our classroom parties that morning. The reason we are not having the parties on the 14th is due to our early release day on Tuesday. If you choose to send valentines to school and include an item with your child's valentines, please note for the safety of our students only non-food items are permissible. This practice is consistent for all classrooms in District 96 elementary schools including Willow Grove. If your child wants to bring in valentines to pass out, please note that we have 24 students in our class. Also, please have your child sign their valentines, but they do not need to write students' names on them. It makes passing out valentines much easier if they are not filled out for specific students. Thank you so much! Please let me know if you have any questions. Wishing you all a wonderful week ahead. Sincerely, Linda Dolan Dear Families,
I hope you are all doing well. Thank you to so many of you who were able to attend our Cultural Fair! It was a great night sharing and learning about our cultures. It was fun seeing so many of you that evening. :) Just a reminder to please send in snacks with your children every day. We have used up our "extra" Cheerios that were meant/used for students who might have forgotten their snacks that day. I really appreciate your help with this. Thank you! This coming week (Monday-Thursday) is a spirit week for the students. Here is the schedule for your children if they would like to participate: Monday 12/19- Crazy Hair Day Tuesday 12/20- PJ Day (please no slippers....shoes are required) Wednesday 12/21- Willow Grove Day (Willow Grove spirit wear, purple or blue) Thursday 12/22- Winter Party Day (winter themed clothing) We will be having our classroom winter parties on Thursday, 12/22. They will be from 10:00-10:45 AM. We look forward to celebrating together. I wish you and your families a wonderful winter break filled with joy, peace and love. Thank you for everything you do. I am truly so lucky to be your children's teacher. Sincerely, Linda Dolan Dear Families,
I want to wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. Enjoy your time with family and friends. I am thankful for your wonderful children and for all of you. This is a reminder to all to save the date of December 8th from 6-7:30 PM for the Willow Grove Cultural Fair. This will be a night to remember. Families are encouraged to wear clothing that represents their culture. For some this may mean special, customary garments, while for others it means dressing up to make it a special night. This isn't required. It just adds to the fun. Any attire is welcome! Please consider coming to this very special evening. I will see you there. :) Our winter weather is here and for students to play in the snow, they must have snow pants, boots, gloves and a jacket. This applies to both the field and the playground area. This ensures that their clothes, hands and feet are dry for lunch and the remainder of the afternoon. Students who do not have snow pants and boots can still play on the blacktop area. If you would like, your child can keep an extra set of snow gear at Willow Grove to avoid the back-and-forth between home and school. Pleases have your child bring it to Willow Grove in a tote/bag to leave in their cubby. You can also send me a quick email letting me know that you would like the snow pants to stay here at school. Thank you! Also, if your child wears boots to school, he/she will need to bring gym shoes to change into for gym class. They can't participate in gym activities without gym shoes on. If you would like to simply leave a pair of gym shoes at school you can certainly do that. Just let me know what you would. Thanks so much! We have been busy working on informational texts in literacy. We are practicing finding main topics and details in our books. We are also starting some sentence writing and the students are doing great! We are up to 15 "heart words". They all love finding them when they are participating in Read to Self! I am very proud of them. We are also continuing stretching out our CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words when reading and writing. Thank you for everything! Enjoy a wonderful Thanksgiving break. Take care! Sincerely, Linda Dear Families, It was great seeing so many of you at the Ice Cream Social/Book Fair. Thanks to all of you that were able to come. It is always a very fun evening. Also, we had our second fire drill last week and again, the Penguins did great! I was so proud of all of them. It is hard to believe that we only have two more weeks left in our first trimester. The grading period ends on November 11th and report cards will be issued on November 18th. I will be sending home several rubrics in the next couple of weeks to share what I am assessing on. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you. Our class is very excited for Halloween tomorrow. Fingers crossed that the weather will cooperate and our Halloween parade will be able to be outdoors. If it is outdoors, families are welcome to come and watch. It will begin at 9:30 tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, if the weather does not cooperate, our parade will have to be indoors, which means families will not be able to attend. Our classroom parties will then be from 10:00-10:45. It will be a fun day! Picture Re-takes will be on Monday, November 7th. If you are interested in having your child's picture retaken or if your child was absent, please email me and let me know. You can also send in the original pictures with your child to school, if you would like a picture re-take. Thank you! Willow Grove ~ Window to the World - Calling All Families!On the evening of December 8th from 6:00-7:30 PM, we’ll be having a fun family event, showcasing the many cultures represented in our school community. We are excited to learn from and celebrate each other! We cannot do this without your support and are looking for parents who would like to share artifacts and traditions from around the country and globe with our students and families. Parents who are interested can share about holidays, traditions, clothing, games/toys, geographical location and landmarks, music, art, food, etc. Children or families may do a short performance (dance, music, etc.). Things families choose to showcase are not limited to places outside of our own country. Families can share about areas right here in the USA and what makes their family unique to help us all learn about one another. We are so excited about this event! We hope that you’ll consider sharing with our school community. We would all love to learn from you! If you would be interested in participating, please CLICK HERE BY NOVEMBER 11th to complete this brief survey. THANK YOU! Note: You can partner up with others! You don’t have to do your booth alone. We will organize groups based on our volunteers and topics and individuals can feel free to work together, if you choose! CLICK HERE to see a video from a previous cultural fair! This will give you a great idea of what the event is all about! Mark your calendars for the evening of December 8th. This will be fun for the whole family! Have a great week! Take care! Sincerely, Linda Dolan Dear Families,
I wanted to thank you all for being a part of our family/educator conferences. It was so nice to chat with you about your wonderful children. I enjoyed our opportunity to do that. I wanted to remind you that the Willow Grove Ice Cream Social/Book Fair is on Thursday, October 20th. It will be from 6:00-7:30 PM. Your child will be able to buy books that evening if they hadn't earlier in the week. It is always a fun evening! With the weather turning pretty chilly, thank you so much for sending in all of the things that will keep them warm outside. It does look like this cold weather is going to warm up a bit in the next few days, but fall is definitely in the air. In literacy, we are going to be reading more literature books. We are going to be working on characters, settings and events in stories. We will also be working on narrative writing. The students will be able to create their own stories with characters, settings and events. It is always so fun to see what they are able to create. We are doing a lot of work in Countdown with hearing and stretching out CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant). We practice hearing all three sounds and now spelling the words as well. We will be celebrating Halloween on October 31st. The parade will be held at 9:30 AM and our classroom parties will take place from 10:00-10:45 AM. Your children can come to school with their costumes on, if that is easier for you. Please let me know if you have any questions. We continue to enjoy our time in the Penguin Class. :) Thank you for everything. Sincerely, Linda Dolan Dear Families,
I hope you all enjoyed a nice long weekend. It sure feels like fall these last couple of days. I wanted to share with you the Penguins filled up our snowball jar! As a class, we voted for stuffed animal day to celebrate. Wednesday, September 28th is the day! Your children can bring in one of their favorite stuffed animals to school. This is not required, but if they are interested in doing so, please send in a small stuffed animal that can sit on their tables at school. Thank you so much! Also, our students will continue to go outside for recess so please make sure they come with a jacket, sweatshirt,...to be comfortable outside. Thank you! Also, if you could please label everything that comes to school, that would be great. I really appreciate it. If you have not sent in a set of extra clothes to school, it would be great if you could. It is nice to have those on hand in case of any accidents. Thank you! Thank you for signing up for our upcoming conferences. They will all be held remotely, unless you email me asking for an in-person conference. If you have not signed up yet, please do so at your earliest convenience. Thank you! We have our picture day on Thursday, September 29th. In literacy, we are starting to read some literature books. We are focusing on characters, settings and events in a story. We are continuing our theme of communities and neighborhoods. We are also working on opinion writing, concentrating on drawing detailed pictures and labeling them. The students have been doing great with this. Please let me know if you have any questions. Take care! Sincerely, Linda Dolan Dear Parents,
I am still working on our blog, but I did want to share it with you so you can get used to navigating through it. On the tabs above, the "Home" tab will give you important dates that are coming up. The "Blog 22-23" tab is where I will be writing our blog/classroom newsletter every other week to keep you updated with things happening in the classroom. The "Classroom Schedule" tab is where you can see the specific days we have our specials. The "Class list" tab lists all of our penguins this year. I am unable to share last names of students. The "Classroom Information" tab will be where I will place specific structures, math letters,... The "Pictures" tab is where I will be sharing some class pictures. We are finished with our first round of MAP tests. Your children did such an amazing job! They completed both the reading and the math MAP tests this past week. Scores will be available sometime late September. This will be communicated through Mrs. Smith's Willow Grove Principal's Message the closer it gets. In literacy, we are talking about informational texts. We are practicing using text features, such as headings, photographs and bolded words. We just completed a book about places in our neighborhood. We are also working on drawing WOW pictures. These are pictures filled with good details, colors and labels. In Countdown, we are working on letter sounds and rhyming. In math, we have introduced some engaging Work Places to practice patterns, one-to-one correspondence, and solid geometric shapes. We also practice our counting every day. **When sending in the nasal swab kit, please be sure the sticker with your child's name is on the bag. Also, you will need to send in only 1 kit each time. All of the other supplies should be kept at home. Thanks so much! (This is only for those who signed up for testing) We are in a nice routine in the Penguin class. I am so proud of them already! Thank you again for all of your sweet messages regarding my husband. They were all very appreciated! Take care! Sincerely, Linda |
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