Here's what we've been doing this week:

• The children are starting to get excited about our big trip to the zoo next month. Be sure to return the permission slip along with the $5 fee as soon as possible. Each class will spend a Wednesday looking at all of the different animals at the zoo. We will eat lunch there and return in time for the normal 1:30 PM dismissal. We need your help to have a successful adventure. If you can join us, it will give us the volunteers that we need to give each child the individual attention that makes the trip more fun. If you think that you can help, please call the school at 503-661-6330 and sign up for the very short volunteer orientation class that each volunteer must take before going on a field trip.
  
  
• To help get us in the mood for our zoo trip, one of the children brought our box of plastic animals to the rug, as well as our movable alphabet. We have all kinds of animals in the box - dinosaurs, farm animals, jungle animals, etc. I took out several of the animals and we talked about their names and where they are usually found. I told them that we would be visiting the Oregon Zoo in a few weeks and we might see some of these animals there. We used our movable alphabet to write the question "What will we see at the zoo?" This was the first time we had written a question, so we learned about some new concepts, such as leaving a space between the words, and putting a question mark at the end. Be patient with your children as they start writing sentences, because it is very hard to remember to leave the spaces between words and sometimes it is hard to know when one word ends and the next one begins. As they have more practice with this, it will become easier.
  
  After we had spelled the question, we worked on the answer: "We will see the lion and the zebra at the zoo". Once again, we had to remember to add the spaces between the words and this time we needed a period at the end. Even though we spelled the other words phonetically, we learned that the word "the" is always spelled "t-h-e". Sometimes the children need to memorize very common words like "the" that are not spelled the way they sound. Try helping your child spell some sentences at home. Start with very simple ones, such as "I go to school" and slowly increase the length.
  
  
• Be sure to let us know if your child is not going home in the usual manner on a particular day. We need to have a note or a call from you so that we know to keep your child at school if he usually rides the bus or goes to day care.

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