Weekly Update

Happy Tuesday!

I hope that you all enjoyed the four day weekend with your kiddos! It was definitely quiet here on Friday. :)

Important Information About Remind App! PLEASE READ!
If Verizon is your cell phone carrier there are some changes coming to the Remind text messaging service on January 28th. Please read this message from Remind to see how you might be affected and what you can do to ensure you keep getting your Remind messages from me! I am copying and pasting the information from Remind:

"Recently, we learned that Verizon will be charging Remind a new fee that makes it impossible for us to continue supporting free text messaging for anyone who has Verizon Wireless as their phone carrier. Please read on for all the important details—we promise to keep this as short as we can.

What’s happening?
To offer our text messaging service free of charge, Remind has always paid for each text that our users receive or send. Now, Verizon is charging Remind an additional fee intended for companies that send spam over its network. Your Remind messages aren’t spam, but our efforts to resolve the issue with Verizon haven’t been successful.  As a result, the Verizon fee will increase our costs of providing text messaging by 11X—pushing our annual costs into the millions of dollars. This isn’t financially feasible for us to support, and it’s forcing us to end Remind text messaging for everyone who has a wireless plan with Verizon.

How will this affect you?
Beginning January 28, 2019, the people in your classes who normally get your Remind messages as texts will no longer receive these messages if they have Verizon Wireless as their phone carrier.

What can you do?
To make sure people in your classes continue receiving your messages, ask them to download the mobile app or enable email notifications—both of which are free of charge. Our team’s also working hard on a solution that allows your classes to continue to use Remind by text, and we’ll share more details with you before January 28."

If you have Verizon, please be sure you have the Remind app downloaded and that you have notifications turned on so you will continue to receive my messages through the Remind app. Thank you!

Quarter 2 Report Cards

Second quarter report cards will be issued Friday, January 25th. Report cards will be issued electronically; I will not send home a paper copy. Your child's report card will be available for viewing Friday afternoon in your ParentVue account. If need assistance logging onto your ParentVue account, please contact Mrs. Sciortino in our school office. 

Crayon Donations

At the beginning of the year, each child was asked to bring in two packs of 24 crayons. We ask for two packs of crayons so that we can switch out our old broken crayons for new ones halfway through the year. On Friday, as I was beginning to change out the students' baggies of crayons, I noticed that many students did not bring in two boxes of crayons at the beginning of the year, so I withheld giving students their new crayons today. If anyone would like to donate a 24 pack of Crayola crayons to our classroom, it would be more than greatly appreciated. Thank you!

100th Day of School

The 100th Day of School is coming! Weather permitting, we will mark this special day on Wednesday, February 6th. (If we have more snow days between now and February 6th, we will adjust the date so it aligns with our 100th day.) The first grade teachers and I have been busy planning for this fun day! Please review last week's Thursday folder for a note inviting students to dress up for our 100th day. Students may dress like a 100-year-old boy or girl, or they may wear a special "100 item shirt."

Valentine's Day Party

Mark your calendar...our classroom Valentine's Day Party will be Thursday, February 14th at 1:20 p.m. in our classroom. All families are welcome to attend. The kids will exchange Valentine's Day cards at the party and I sent home a class roster in last week's Thursday folder along with information about creating their valentines mailbox. The card exchange is completely voluntary, although historically, majority of the class participates. If your child brings Valentine's Day cards, please be sure that he/she has one for every child in the class. If your child wants to attach a little "something" to his/her Valentine's Day card, please do not attach any food or candy. Little items include pencils, erasers, stick on tattoos, stickers, etc. 

Focus Areas for This Week:

• Reading- We will learn tools for solving and checking hard words. We will ask, "does that make sense, sound right, and look right?" after solving a hard word.
• Writing- We will practice editing and paragraph writing using the Four Square method.
• Math- We will begin our addition unit, in which we learn strategies for adding two numbers. We will learn that addition is a part/part/whole relationship... part+part=whole
• Science- We will begin our Matter unit. We will explore the three states of matter and conduct a few matter experiments. 

As always, please reach out with questions, comments, or concerns.