newsletter – Beyond The Desk

First Day Under Our Belt!

September 3, 2013 eoin24 Comments 0 Comment

Well, our first day is under our belt! It was a great start. The students (and the teacher!) were all very excited! It was great to see all the students and hear their excited chatter as they re-established old friendships and got settled into their new class.

We had a busy day today with lots of activities to start getting to know each other. One of the things we did today was to create a mission statement of how our class is going to run this year. Rather than a set of rules that feel prescriptive and restrictive, this mission statement instead will describe what we want to see happen this year, how we will accomplish this and why we want this to happen.We are still finalizing the statement to make it clearer and easier to read. When we are done, I will post it on the blog for everyone to see. I will also be doing a good copy of the statement and having the students all sign it.

I also gave each student a newsletter to take home today which you should have received. At the back of the newsletter is some homework for the parents. The students were all very happy that their parents were getting homework and not them! 🙂 If you could please fill in the questionnaire and send it back with your child, that would be very helpful for me in getting to know your child better. I have also put a copy of the newsletter below.

Other Items:

Phys. Ed and Music: Phys.Ed will be on Tuesday’s and Friday’s this year. Students should have a PE Kit to change into for those days.

Calendar: I have set up a calendar on the blog for important dates and reminders. I try to keep this updated as much as possible and enter in dates as I get them. You should see a link at the top of the page to view the calendar.

Spelling: During the month of September we concentrate on reviewing the phonograms and working on handwriting. Therefore we will not be starting spelling until the end of September. I will be putting out more information about Spelling as we get closer.

I think that is about it for now. Please remember that this blog is a very important tool in communicating what is happening. There are also lots of resources for both you and your children as well as lots of fun things that I find occasionally. So please check out the blog as much as possible or sign up to be notified when a new article is posted!

2013 First Day Newsletter by ihancock

Oh, What A Wonderful Day!!!

May 9, 2008 eoin24 Comments 0 Comment

Moon The sun finally came out today!!! What a gorgeous day! It was a much smaller class today with four children missing. That is very rare for our class. We had many things to do still and got them all done on time. Students have a home letter for you to sign and bring back on Monday. You should also be receiving a newsletter if you haven’t already seen it from the website.

We also had something very cool today. I got a website this morning where you could sign up to have your name inscribed on a plaque and put into the next NASA spacecraft going to the Moon. The site describes it as this:

Sign up to send your name to the moon. Names will be collected and placed onboard the LRO spacecraft for its historic mission bringing NASA back to the moon. You will also receive a certificate showcasing your support of the mission.

The deadline is June 27, 2008 for the submission of names.

LRO’s objectives are to find safe landing sites, locate potential resources, characterize the radiation environment, and demonstrate new technology.

It was very cool and I got all the children signed up. They also got their certificate to bring home. We were talking about it all day!!! Just think! Our names on the Moon!

By the way, did you know you can use Google Moon to see the Moon in detail????

On a completely different topic, I had mentioned in an earlier post that I was going to focus on a couple of topics of interest to parents. I am going to talk about Internet Safety to start as more and more students use the internet at home. Sometimes it is scary how comfortable children can be with the internet and computer and know so much without understanding the consequences.Today, I am going to start with one of the most important things with protecting your child:

Supervise your child while online and consider putting the computer in a common room of the house.

This sounds fairly common sense but you would not believe how many kids (and not just from here!) tell me that they have a computer in their rooms. Whether or not the computer is connected to the Internet, it should still be in an area where the time and content is being monitored. Common areas can be kitchens, family rooms or other places where the child has the expectation that someone could come by at any moment. Having the computer in the bedroom does not allow for this and students can be very good at hiding their tracks and using the computer when they think their parents are asleep or busy. Children are naturally curious and the Internet has many elements that can be tempting to curious minds and extremely easy to get to. With the computer in a common area, this helps children deal with these temptations in a non-combative manner. The computer is just placed in a common area. You don’t have to worry about what they are up to when the bedroom door is closed or whether they are on late at night.

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