Week of: November 2 nd – November 6 th News to Know SPIRIT WEAR: An order form went home earlier this week regarding Holmes School spirit wear. All orders are due next Friday and online orders are due by November 20 th. THANK YOU: I want to send a big thank you to everyone who helped out with our recent field trip to the OPRF Food Pantry. Thank you for the donations, the wagons and the help on the day of the trip. PICTURE RETAKES: If you are not pleased with your child’s recent school photo, you can have their picture retaken. On Thursday, November 19 th Van Gogh Photography will be back for picture retakes. If you have a problem with you order please contact Van Gogh directly at and use their “Help Center” HOLIDAY GIFT BASKETS: Holmes School will again be participating in the Oak Park/River Forest holiday gift basket program. Each year we sponsor 6 or more needy families and last year we purchased gifts for a total of 24 people. The suggested donation per student is $5 to cover the cost of purchasing gifts however any donation is greatly appreciated. Rowdy Readers STANDARDS: This week, we very very busy with a number of new and old concepts. We worked on comparing stories, recognizing how settings change, recognizing how characters change, knowing the difference between fiction and nonfiction and sequencing events from a familiar story. Some of the books and stories that helped us out with these skills this week were: Simon and Molly Plus Hester The Turtle and the Sheep The Little Red Hen The Boy and the Jaguar LETTERS AND SOUNDS: We spent some time reviewing some of the letter and sounds that we have worked on in the past month. The specific sounds were /m/, /s/, /p/ and /a/. WORDS: We added the new sight word “in” this week to our Word Wall. Our wall now has nine words: a, like, the, can, we, am, I, at and in. We also added five new vocabulary words to our collection. These words are meant to improve student’s oral language. The new words are: solve, problem, thoughtful, grateful and include. Math Madness This week in our afternoon math lessons, activities and games we worked on counting with one-to-one correspondence. We started with smaller amounts of objects and slowly add more and more. These activities helped up to keep track of the objects that we counted and control our count. One of the highlights from the week was a scavenger hunt! Upcoming Dates Friday, November 6 th : PTO Trivia Night 11/10-11/12: Holmes School Dental Clinic (FREE!) Friday, November 13 th : Orders due for spirit wear Thursday, November 19 th : Picture Retake Day Friday, November 20 th : Online orders due for spirit wear Tuesday, November 24 th : End of 1 st Trimester Things we do at Holmes/Things to work on at home Counting syllables (or parts) within a word Writing word wall words in sentences Writing 0-9 with the correct formation Counting beyond 30 Recognizing and generating rhymes Recognizing when a setting changes in a story