End of Year

Can you believe that we are almost finished???? It's crazy how quickly the school year has gone by!!! The students have all worked soooooo hard and have matured sooooo much since the beginning of the school year! I am proud beyond words!


As the school year comes to a close, please mark your calendar for some important dates:


*May 14 @ 7:00pm students in chorus, bells, violins, and recorders will preform for the parents! Get there early, it will be amazing!


*May 15th- Take Your Child To Work Day-Students must have already submitted their field trip form in order to participate.


*May 19th-Kona Ice (yeeeeeeesssssssssss!)


*May 22 from 6-8-Art Gallery-Selected students that received invitations will have their work displayed in the Media Center.


*May 26th-Memorial Day-No School


*****May 28th @8:45-4th Grade 3rd Quarter Awards and End of the Year Awards*****


June 4th-End of Year Class Celebration! (more details to follow)


June 5th-LAST DAY OF SCHOOL!!!

HAPPPPPPYYYY NEEEWWWWW YEEEAAARRRR!!!!!!!!!! January

Am I late???? Things have just crept up on us!!! I can't believe we just got back from vacation and it's already the end of the month! Where has the time gone????  We are buckling down for FCAT Writing that will be in February...I think we have some amazing writers in our class!!! All they need is a little tweaking and we will ROCK that FCAT!  Here are a few things you can do at home to help your child prepare for the writing test.  Continue to keep the lines of communication opened with your child.  Give them a topic and ask them to make up a story for it.  For example,  Tell me about a day you had an amazing surprise.  Make sure the story is full of details and little mini stories and experiences.  Here are a few ideas that I pulled from the internet:

• Give your fourth-grader a narrative topic through prompts such as "A Day We Went to the Zoo" or "An Unforgettable Day in My Life." For expository topics, choose examples such as "Eating Healthy Food" or "Importance of Reading." With a 10th-grader, provide writing prompts for persuasive essays such as "Convince a Friend to Continue Schooling" or "Persuade Your School Principal to Abolish the School Uniform."   

     

• Sit with your child and assess the essay he wrote for spelling and grammar. Mark out misspelled words and have him check them up in a dictionary. Look at punctuation and grammar, and using other examples, help your child understand the mistakes in his essay.

          

• Mark words that you consider ambiguous or weak. Ask your child to explain the exact point she wants to convey, and encourage your child to browse a dictionary of synonyms to find the most appropriate word. Show your child how to test a variety of words by saying them aloud in the sentence to discover which sounds best.

• Prepare an essay that is full of content arranged in a haphazard manner. Give it to your child and ask him to organize the content into introductory, body and concluding paragraphs. Explain how this improves the flow of the topic

• Set a schedule for your child to read newspapers, magazines and Internet articles. Ask her to note down observations regarding sentence structure, ways of describing and the use of idioms and phrases. Encourage her to use a few of these while preparing her essay.

• Give your child prompts on different relevant topics and ask him to come up with an outline of at least five ideas on which he will focus for each. For expository and persuasive essays, get him to think of quotes by famous personalities that connect to the topic and show how he can incorporate these in the introduction or the conclusion.

Hope this helps!! Thank you for helping me!


PS Yipee!!! Congrats to my Students of the Month I am so proud of you!!!!
September: Priscilla
October:  Kaithlyn
November: Jasmine R.

December

December is going to be very busy for us! There is so much to do, and such little time!! 

 

First of all, I would like to take this time to thank all of you for all of your support during field day and the Thanksgiving feast.  We have had such a great time together building so many memories!



Our Thanksgiving feast was bitter sweet...we were all thankful to be a part of a great class, but saddened that Mrs. Farrington was leaving us.  She has worked very hard with all of the students and has told me on several occasions how much she will miss them.  As you are all aware, I will be taking over the Language Arts and writing block.  Mrs. Fernandez will be coming in to assist with the writing as she has many more years of experience with making sure that the students are writing what the judges are looking for. 

 

Our Honor Roll ceremony will be tomorrow, December 5th and we will start promptly at 8:45am.  The students have all worked diligently and deserve their awards! We hope that you can all be here to celebrate with us!

 

Reading Under the Stars is BACK! Mark your calendar! December 10th & 11th from 6pm-8pm.  We are soooooo excited!!!!! We will have so much entertainment for our students!! For the older students, we will have a DJ, arts and crafts, food trucks, stories, but best of all, this year we will have a DUNK TANK with TEACHERS inside waiting for someone to dunk them! How crazy will that be???? I even heard rumors that one of the administrators will be inside the tank!

Our classroom holiday celebration will be on December 19th the last hour of the day. I will be sending more information on what activities we will be doing, so stay tuned!

If I don't get a chance to see you from now until the 20th, I would like to extend my warmest wishes to you and your family for a fun, safe, and amazing Holiday break!!!  Remember that we will be back to school on January 6, 2014.


XOXOXOXO,
Mrs. Ricardo

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog! I am so happy that you have taken the time to visit. Our school year is off to a very busy first couple of weeks. In order to facilitate the home/school connection, please visit my blog as often as possible. Here I will communicate with you upcoming events and important classroom or school news. Please take a moment to surf the blog and visit some of the links that I have provided for you.  I hope to see you all during Open House so that I can meet each and every one of you!!