Week of: October 19th – October 23rd

News to KnowTHANK YOU: I would like to thank everyone who made time in their busy schedules to meet with me this week. Conferences are a VERY valuable opportunity to get you caught up on how your child is doing in the classroom and improve our parent/teacher relationship. Thank you all!!!FUNDRAISER: Holmes School’s First Graders are planning to give back this December with the Chicago-based, nonprofit organization, Share Your Soles.  Please help us by sending dollar donations with your child.  100% of your donations go to Share Your Soles. The 1st grade team will use paper shoes to represent those students who participated in the fundraiser by displaying them on the 1st floor bulletin board. OAK PARK FIRE: Please check out the District 97 home page to find out how you might be able to help out a number of displaced families from last week’s fire near Washington and Ridgeland. DONATIONS/FIELD TRIP: Keep those food donations coming for our upcoming field trip to the OPRF Food Pantry. We have a great collection so far. Also, don’t forget our permission slip!

Rowdy ReadersSTANDARDS: This week we worked on the difference between fiction and nonfiction, started work on syllables, gained confidence in beginning and ending sound and continued our Kevin Henkes author study. Here are a list of some of the books that helped us to accomplish these goals:

•Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse•Sheila Rea the Brave•What Do You Like•Games Around the World•Country Mouse and City Mouse•This Book Just Ate My Dog

Thank you to Jessica for coming in this week to be our Mystery Reader!SIGHT WORDS: This week our new sight word was “like”. Our list is now up to seven words: I, like, at, am, the, we and can. SOUNDS: We concentrated on the /s/ sound this week and worked on finding words that begin and end with /s/. Our list of words that we kept coming up with was HUGE!

Math MadnessWe continued our work recognizing number, quantities and writing numbers this week. We made sure that we could count up to 30, recognize numbers up to 20 and write number up to 6. We also worked on a new term, “subitizing”. This is a verb that is the act of recognizing a quantity without counting. We worked on subitizing with fingers, dice and ten frames.

Upcoming DatesMonday, October 26th: Mr. Dolan ABSENT!Wednesday, October 28th: Kevin Henkes Mouse PartyFriday, October 30th: Fall Parade and PartySaturday, October 31st: Daylight SavingsMonday, November 2nd: Turkey TrotWednesday, November 4th: Food Pantry Field Trip!11/10-11/12: Holmes School Dental Clinic (FREE!)

Get to Know Your Child’s TeacherDoes Mr. Dolan have any siblings? YES! I have two older sisters, Becca and Chrissy. Becca is the oldest out of the three. She lives in Volo, IL with her husband Mike and is a Special Education teacher at Butterfield School in Libertyville (where we all went to school!). Chrissy lives is Clive, IA with her two kids, Evan and Natalie, and her husband Jon.