Dear Parents,

     It was great to be able to meet and discuss the progress of your student during SEP's. Thank you for all you do to support them in their education. SEP's are a great time for us to celebrate together the growth of your child.

    I wanted to clarify something that I found to be a common misunderstanding during SEP's. Please record the time you spend each night doing daily reading homework with your student as part of their weekly reading minutes goal. Some parents are spending lots of time on reading homework, but then not feeling like this time should be included in the weekly reading minutes. It definitely should! So, please record minutes you spend reading stories to your student as well as time spent practicing their homework with them.

    We have a contest going right now with Taylorsville Elementary to see which school is getting the most weekly reading minutes for our Road to Success program. They are "smoking us"! Probably not as much as they think they are if we record all the minutes that we can legally count. So, Please feel free to go backwards and "guesstimate" fairly what those extra minutes may be, and then record them on an upcoming week. I will get them entered into our spread sheet so we can count those minutes in our total. Thank you so much for all the great reading time you are spending with your children. It shows!

    Also, we have now started the Book-it program, so students can earn a pizza certificate for their own personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut if they meet their monthly reading goal of 80 minutes per week. The number of reading minutes reported declined sharply in November, I believe largely because all the minutes spent reading are not being recorded. So, keep up the good work parents and record all those minutes!

    December will be a busy, but fun month for us in Kindergarten. We will be practicing two songs to perform for you at our parents' special performance of the sing-a-long. This will be on Friday morning December 18th. This means that on that day all the Kindergarten students will be attending school in the morning. This is so they can all participate in the sing-a-long, first for parents, grandparents etc at 8:50 a.m., and then again with the entire school grades K-6 at 9:15 a.m. School will then be dismissed at 10:35 a.m. for the Winter Recess. School will start again on Monday January 4th of 2010. We ask that you not check your student out of school early on this day, but allow them to stay until 10:35 a.m. so they can participate with the rest of the student body for this fun Arcadia holiday tradition.

    Thanks again for your wonderful support!

    Sincerely,

    Mrs. Godfrey