BARFIELD BANNER

Dear Parents and Guardians,

Happy New Year! I hope that you had time to rest and relax over the break! I certainly enjoyed that extra time with my family and friends. December was a busy month, filled with wonderful memories for our staff and students.

As we head into January, I would like you to pay special attention to our district calendar. We have a few days off this month, in addition to two early release days. Teachers will be utilizing one of the days off to complete quarter 2 report cards. Report cards will go home towards the end of the month. If you have any questions or concerns regarding your child’s progress, please don’t hesitate to reach out to their teacher. We do have science (5th grade only) and writing (4th and 5th grade) testing happening this month as well. We are also looking forward to celebrating Literacy Week at the end of January! Please review the list of dates below. Thank you for your continued support!

Important Dates:

January 1st- No School

January 2nd- Students Return

January 5th- 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade parent lunch

January 12th- Early Release Day/End of Quarter 2

January 15th and 16th- No School

January 17th- PTO Meeting

January 18th- SAC Meeting at 5:00 pm

January 19th- Kinder, 1st, and 2nd grade parent lunch

January 22nd- Report Cards Published

January 23rd- Literacy Night

January 24th- Early Release Day

Toys from home: Over the holidays students may get new toys. Although new toys are fun to share, please keep toys at home. Safety is a priority at TBE. Please check and clean out backpacks to make sure your child is not bringing toys to school that could get lost or can become a distraction. Toys, Pokémon or other trading cards, pop its, or items that are a distraction need to stay at home.

Attendance-

Please refer to the CCPS academic calendar when planning vacations and appointments as much as possible. Vacation days are not excused absences and students miss valuable instruction by the teacher on the days they are not in school. A doctor note excusing an absence must be turned in to the school office within 24 hours of the student returning to school to be marked excused in the computer. Parents will receive a letter in the mail when the student has excessive absences whether they are excused or not. Habitual absences are monitored by the County Attendance Officer and may result in Truancy Court.

Students who have been approved for Out-of-Zone permission to attend Tommie Barfield may be in jeopardy of having this revoked if they accumulate excessive absences and/or tardies and/or early pick-ups from school. Students are recognized quarterly and annually for perfect attendance.

Please follow attendance procedures and call 377-8500 or email TBEdismissal@collierschools.com to report your child’s absence each and every day your child is absent. Contacting the school will validate the absence so it will not result in an UNEXCUSED absence on your child’s record.

Arrival and Dismissal- Please review these arrival and dismissal procedures to keep all our students safe. Adult supervision starts at 7:45 in the morning. and our WTBE News starts @ 8:15! Dismissal begins at 2:50 p.m. For the safety of our students, please have your car rider sign visible and remember that the car line is a No Cell Phone Zone. Thank you for helping us greet and dismiss our students safely every day!

Florida B.E.S.T Standards-The teachers are busy teaching the rigorous Florida B.E.S.T Standards. These standards as well as other parent resources can be accessed through the Florida Department of Education website below.

https://www.fldoe.org/accountability/assessments/k-12-student-assessment/best/

District/State Testing Days/Windows: Please mark your calendars and try to pan appointments or schedule vacations around the following dates or testing windows.

Jan 9th Grade 5 Science District QB2

Apr 9th Grades 4th-5th B.E.S.T. State Writing Test

Apr 23rd-25th Grades K-2 PM3 State Reading Test (1 day TBA)

May 1st–3rd Grades 3-5 PM3 State Reading Test (1 day TBA)

May 7th-9th Grades K-2 PM3 State Math Test (1 day TBA)

May 14th–16th Grades 3-5 PM3 State Math Test (1 day TBA)

May 21st Grade 5 State Math Test

May 20th-30th Select Courses Post Test (TBA)

Dear Parents,

We appreciate all of your support with our holiday activities during the month of December! THANK YOU!

In Math, we will continue to count 1-100, starting from any given number, adding / subtracting within 10 and finding different ways to make numbers up to 10. In ELA, we will be working on retelling of a story to enhance their comprehension along with comparing / contrasting characters in stories. Students should be able to identify uppercase / lowercase letters, beginning – middle – ending sounds of a word, and fluently read between 43-67 sight words by the end of the 3rd quarter. Students will be writing 2-3 complete sentences. In Science, we will be learning about Models. Social Studies we will be talking about National Holidays - Martin Luther King Jr., and calendars: days, weeks and months.

The Kindergarten Teachers

Dear Partents,

We hope everyone had a wonderful winter break sharpening the saw! Thank you for all your support with our holiday activities during the month of December!

In reading, we have been working on Module 5. It is called … Now You See It, Now You Do Not. The stories have to do with sources of light and dark and the many sources of light. We are exploring text features, similarities and differences within texts, and suffixes. As we move into module 6, we will be celebrating America and learning about different holidays and symbols.

In Fundations, we are continuing to learn new glued sound, consonant blends, digraph blends, and r-controlled vowels.

In math we are starting Unit 3, Place Value. We are learning how to represent the tens and ones placed in 2-digit numbers. As well as how to decompose and compare 2-digit numbers. Remember to keep working on memorizing additional facts.

As we begin a new year, remember to encourage your child to work to be the very best by following the seven habits. These lessons will help your child to be a great leader in and out of school.

The First Grade Team

Dear Parents,

We cannot believe the 2nd Quarter is coming to an end! Time has flown past with lots of learning and holiday fun. We want to send a special thank you to all our awesome parents for sending in goodies for Grinch Day and helping with Field Day. We could not have these fun days without you!

As we continue our learning journey after Winter Break, our students will be exploring emotions and the Circle of Control during our Leader in Me time. These lessons are not only valuable in the classroom, but also in our everyday lives. During the second half of these nine weeks, students will continue to learn phonics skills such as vowel-consonant -e, closed syllables, double final consonants, and multi-syllables words. Students will continue to identify rhyme schemes in poems, to build comprehension skills, identify the central idea, story structure, relevant details, identifying, and explaining the theme, and retelling a text to enhance comprehension. In math, students will be working on customary and metric units of measurements. Additionally, students will use these skills to solve two-step problems with comparison. In Science, we will explore the composition and structure of the surface of earth.

Thank you again for your continued support!

Warmest wishes,

Your Second Grade Teachers

As the second quarter comes to an end, our third graders have continued to do great things!

The students learned about what sports can teach us about working together. They focused on explaining character development, characters’ perspectives, and identified types of poems in literary text. The students also worked on explaining the development of an author’s purpose in informational text as well as comparing and contrasting across different genres. In writing, the students wrote an opinion piece including reasons supported by details.

In Science, the students described the changes water undergoes when it changes state. In Social Studies, we learned about the continents and oceans, the five regions of the United States and how the environment influences where people live.

Please continue to read with your child every night and practice their math facts. We appreciate your support and all that you do for our students! We hope your families had a wonderful holiday season!

Thank you,

The Third Grade Team

Dear Parents,

Welcome back to everyone and Happy New Year. We hope everyone had a relaxing and safe winter break. As we are “keeping the end in mind” with starting a new year we plan to stay focused on growing, learning, and working hard to continue to accomplish our goals and make this a successful new year.

At the end of December, we wrapped up our units on Minerals and Rocks and Weathering and Erosion. Students were able to investigate and classify both rocks and minerals by their properties and further exam the differences between weathering and erosion. We will be moving into our unit on Earth’s rotation, revolution, and the phases of the moon, which always is a favorite with our kids!

In math, we finished Unit 8 on equivalent fractions. Students will continue to be actively engaged using mathematical strategies to represent fractions as they utilize those strategies to add, subtract, and multiply fractions and mixed numbers.

Right before winter break all our 4th graders took their second iReady diagnostic. This month students will be taking their quarter 2 benchmark math assessment, and both their reading and math progress monitoring assessments. These assessments are a very important instructional tool that helps us educators reflect, guide, and better engage our students.

We are now diving deeper into Habit 5: Seek First to Understand then to be Understood. Our students should be very familiar with this habit because they have been actively working on and displaying it through our “Connect for Success” LEAD time lessons.

We are now moving into quarter 3 and students are analyzing and adjusting their goals to better reach those goals by the end of the school year. Please remember that our students are expected to be in school and engaged every day. If you have any questions or concerns about your child, please feel free to contact us here at the school any time. Success will happen as we continue to work together to help, support, and nurture our students so they can reach their fullest potential.

The Fourth Grade Team

Dear fifth grade families,

It’s been a crazy month of oscillating between state testing and celebrations/dress up days! But we all survived, and students showed tremendous growth across the board. We are very proud of how hard your fifth grader has worked. In Math, please continue working on both multi-digit multiplication and division algorithms at home. We are beginning our first unit on fractions. Students will be expected to be able to add and subtract fractions and mixed numbers with unlike denominators. In Science, students have finished the unit on climate/biomes and will be working on plant and animal adaptations. Please remind your fifth grader to study their science notes nightly. In Reading, we finished our unit that focused on fictional texts focusing on literary elements, theme, summarizing, and making inferences. With this next unit, we will shift our focus to informational text and explaining central ideas, summarizing texts, comparing and contrasting sources, and analyzing poetry.

Please remember the importance of your child being at school daily. Make up work cannot replace an entire day’s worth of learning. Please contact your child’s teacher at any time should you have any questions or concerns, and as always, thank you for your support. We are so fortunate to have such a supportive community.

The fifth grade team

Let’s start the new year with a CRASH!!! Cymbal crash that is… Our new theme is MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. Younger grades are exploring how sound is produced on a variety of instruments while our upper grades are getting some hands on time with recorders and ukuleles. So Pardon Our Noise….there’s a lot of learning going on!!!

Happy New Year! We will continue working on our throwing and catching skills in PE as we wrap up the quarter. Additionally, I will be opening up spots for our 1st graders to join run club beginning in the end of January. If your child is interested in running before school (7:45-8:05) on Wednesdays and Thursdays, have them keep an eye out for the applications.

Deana Richett

Riched1@collierschools.com

Reading Counts updates, first through fifth graders have read 47,121,969 words so far this year. Students in grades 1-5, have taken and passed 5,630 tests on Reading Count Books.

Pumpkin Jack continues to decompose. We had a couple seed sprouted but they may not have gotten enough sun. We have begun to place Jack by the window after school so we will continue to watch and see what happens!

In January I will be kicking off the SSYRA Jr challenge at TBE. I will challenge each second grader to read and test on the 5 Independent reader SSYRA books. These are beginning chapter books. Any second grader who reads and passes a Reading Counts test earns a SSYRA Jr brag tag! I will begin reading aloud the 10 SSYRA Jr picture books to kindergarten students and hope to make some guest aloud appearances in First grade.

Our SSYRA challenge is in full swing, and we currently have 38 students who are eligible to vote for their favorite SSYRA book on March 26th.

Our first SSYRA celebration is coming up the week of February 5th. Any 3rd- 5th grader that has read and tested on 7 SSYRA books will be invited to come and celebrate in our TBE GLOW ROOM!

Dear Parents/Guardians,

Helping our children to cope with emotions that may be uncomfortable is my focus for January. Here are nine fun coping skills for your family to use:

1. Take deep breaths.
2. Do a positive activity like playing a board game.
3. Play sports.
4. Think of something funny.
5. Take a quick walk.
6. Stand up and stretch.
7. Listen to music.
8. Take a time out. Have fun things to do in a quiet room like play dough, art supplies, leggos…
9. Slowly count to 10.

Happy New Year!

Leanne Hope

School Counselor

hopele@collierschools.com

Hope everyone had a nice holiday season.

We have our 1st 2024 Dine out at Tropical Smoothie on Tuesday January 16th. This is a no school day, so it will be available for lunch and dinner. Please make sure to mention TBE when ordering or picking up the food.

January is an exciting month; we are working on a birthday Committee to offer popsicles and dress down passes to celebrate your child’s birthday. This will be done through our website. www.tommiebarfieldpto.com. Links and information to come soon.

We are also offering our 1st Ever Auction at TBE. Auction dates will be 19th to 28th January. We will be Auctioning the 1st Spot in Car rider line for pickup. This will be Auctioned monthly. Weekly birthday name on the Marquee sign and front row seats to the TBE Graduation. Stay tuned for more details. Keep an eye out for the Wednesday folder.

Lastly, we have the Everblades Hockey dates secured for TBE families. We are scheduled for February 10th at 7pm Game. Tickets are $19 each and $5 from every ticket goes back to PTO. This was such a fun experience for our families last year.

This is the link to book: www.Blade0sTix.com/TBES

Thank you for all your support, we are excited to be back!

From Your PTO Board.