Wiley Elementary Newsletter

HAPPY 2025! I hope everyone had a great Holiday Break and enjoyed time with family and friends. It is hard to believe that this school year is already half way over! Where has the time gone? As a new year rolls around, it brings many opportunities for positive learning time. Holidays have now passed and we are renewed for a new year. This allows the next few months to focus on incredible learning and mastering grade level concepts. We appreciate the parent's efforts getting your children to school each day. Students who are consistently at school each day naturally achieve more. Please keep up the great work, parents! We see the impact it's making on learning at Wiley.

As we start this second semester of the 24-25 school year, please remember that consistent attendance is crucial for your child's learning. If your child has to miss school, please let the front office know so they can be properly accounted for. A quick email or Dojo message to your child's teacher would be appreciated as well. This time of the year seems to be when sickness strikes. We will do our best at school to make sure classrooms and various locations that students visit frequently are disinfected daily. We will also stress proper handwashing and sickness prevention. If your child is running a fever, please keep them home. We ask that you make sure your children are getting enough sleep each night. We also ask that you make sure that you are sending your children to school properly dressed for winter weather. Making it a habit to send children with a heavier coat, hat, and gloves would be appropriate. Students will be going outside for recess if the "feel like" temperature is 23 degrees or above.

We are excited to have the students back in the building and are ready for the second semester. Please reach out to your child's teacher or myself if you have any questions or concerns.

January 9th:

* December Academic Assembly at 3:00 pm

January 13th:

* 3rd-5th NWEA Testing

January 14th:

* K-5th NWEA Testing

January 15:

* K-5th NWEA Testing

January 17th:

* Staff In-service Day

January 20th:

* School Board Meeting @ 7:00pm- Rock School House

Attendance is a priority at Wiley Elementary. We have a school wide challenge going on between each classroom. Our challenge is to see which classroom can have the highest percentage of attendance for the month. The class that has the highest attendance rate for the month gets to display a traveling trophy in their classroom for the month. Congratulations to Mrs. Compton's Kindergarten class for having the highest attendance rate for the month of December. They had a 94% attendance rate.

Past Winners Include:

September: Mrs. Forgey (3rd)

October: Mrs. Fry (2nd)

November: Mrs. Forgey (3rd)

Literacy: Introducing sizing and letter spacing, story retelling and sequencing, writing first and last names.

Math: 1 to1 counting, number recognition, and counting to 20.

Science: Blubber experiment, making snow, sensory paly with snow/ice, hibernation, habitats and winter animals.

Social/Emotional: Celebrate MLK Jr. to learn about diversity, equality, and kindness.

Other: Dressing for the weather

* Be working on self help skills at home like putting on their own jacket and zipping it, unbuttoning and buttoning, etc.

* Be sure to read EVERY NIGHT with your child. This creates a love for reading and will help when they start to read and sound out words soon.

REMINDERS:

* Please check your child's folder daily.

* Blankets for rest time should be laundered weekly. There are so many germs this time of year, let's work together to stop the spread!

Reading: Fiction and Informational Text, Character, Setting, Events, Main Topic, Key Details, Pronouns.

Writing: Structuring sentences/letter formation

Math: Understanding/Introduction to Addition

Science: Properties of matter

Social Studies: Our community

Reading: Ask and answer questions about their reading, plot and sequence, verb tense,

apostrophes with contractions, and alphabetical order.

Writing: Shurley Grammar- Editing Sentences for 5 rules of a complete sentence, classifying

sentences with helping verbs, prepositional phrases, pronouns, different noun jobs, different

types of sentences and what punctuation to use.

Math: Adding tens and ones to two digit numbers using mental math and other strategies.

Science: Different characteristics of plants and animals and what their functions are. Learning how plants and animals use these characteristics to grow, adapt and survive.

Social Studies: Physical characteristics of different places. Natural and Man Made

characteristics of the land and adapting to our environment. Identifying the characteristics of our

town and area.

* Have your child read to you everyday.

* Ask them about the author, setting and characters.

* Have them retell the story in the correct sequence of events.

* Help them with speaking in the correct verb tense in everyday conversation.

Reading: Compare and contrast, point of view, similes, cause and effect, proper nouns, book titles, abbreviations.

Phonics: Silent letters, r-controlled vowels

Writing: Shurley Grammar- identifying helping verbs, identifying the complete subject and predicate in sentences, identifying declarative and interrogative sentences, possessive nouns, irregular verbs.

Math: Subtraction within 100 using number lines, breaking apart numbers, compensation, models, and partial differences, solving multi-step word problems, and reviewing addition within 1,000.

Science: Life Science - plant life cycles, needs of a plant, different parts of plants.

Social Studies: Economics - wants and needs, goods and services, how economics plays a role in our individual lives as well as our community.

Reading: We will be focusing on comparing and contrasting, character development and perspective, asking and answering questions, summarizing, using maps and captions. We will also be working on figurative language with similes.

Writing: We will be working on adding helping verbs, interrogative sentences and sentences in inverted word order. We will be developing a "How To" for snowmen.

Math: We will be reading and constructing graphs and data, multiplying using multiples of 10, and solving word problems with all operations with multiple steps.

Science: We will be learning about animals. The different types of animals (vertebrates and invertebrates). Knowing and using characteristics of animals, classifying mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and birds.

Social Studies: We will continue to learn about the regions of the United States focusing on Southwest and West Regions. We will begin our research on our states.

Reading: Fluency, Cause & Effect, Making Predictions, Point of View, Inflectional endings

Math: Multi-step word problems, Factors, Prime & Composite Numbers, Multiples, CMAS Prep

Science: Phases of the Moon, Leaves, Plants & Animals

Social Studies: Mountain Men, Fur Trappers

* Multiplication/Division facts through 12

* Weekly spelling words

Reading: Biographies, author's perspective, text features: photographs and captions, text structure: chronological summarizing, prefixes/suffixes, Novel Study: Hatchet

Writing: Identifying and creating all four types of sentences using the following parts of speech: Nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions and interjections.

Math: Estimating sums and differences of fractions, finding common denominators, adding and subtracting fractions, estimating sums and differences of mixed numbers, adding and subtracting mixed numbers.

Science: Plants grow from primarily air and water, matter cycles within an environment (plants, animals, decomposers, soil), stars vary in size and distance, resulting in relative brightness.

Social Studies: Native Americans of North America, Early European exploration.

* Read to/with your child frequently.

* Practice spelling words

* Practice math facts

* Students bring dress code appropriate clothes for gym.

At Wiley Elementary, we take attendance very serious. In this section, you will see our monthly attendance rates. Students that have perfect attendance and two or fewer unexcused absences each month are recognized at our Monthly Academic Assemblies.

August 2024- 95.7%

September 2024- 95.6%

October 2024- 96.8%

November 2024- 94.9%

December 2024- 96.5 %