Dear 4B Families,
I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Now that we are in the swing of things, it’s been great to see your students in academic action. I am in awe of the students’ hard work, and adaptability every day!
Math/Reading Challenge Celebration…Day of the Doughnuts!! Thank you to all of the students who completed the math and/or reading challenges! Here is how we will celebrate.
What: A celebration of doughnuts, refreshments, music, trivia, and raffle prizes to reward the students’ hard work
Date: Friday, 9/24
Where: Socially distanced in the school hall
When: Two morning sessions for grades K-4 & two afternoon sessions for grades 5-8
We look forward to the first annual Day of the Doughnuts! **Mrs. Heuer and Ms. Wallace**
Picture Day: This Tuesday, September 14th is individual class picture day. Parents have the ability to preorder photos by visiting the Holy Rosary Yuen Lui page through Tuesday, September 21. After this date, photos will be processed for printing. Photos will be shipped to the school for distribution. If you choose to order at a later date, there is an additional cost to cover individualized printing, packaging, and shipping. Students may wear free dress on picture day.
Magazine Drive: It is time to kick off our first fundraiser of the year! The Magazine Drive site is ready for registrations and sales. This year’s theme is “GATOR STRONG: Rooted in Community”.
The annual Magazine Drive is Holy Rosary School’s second largest NET fundraiser, approximately $125,000 is raised!
A FEW NOTES
Magazine Drive Tidbits:
- Registration is per family, register under your oldest child.
- Each HRS K-8 child, in your family, will receive the prize at the level reached through 50 orders.
- A donation to our Uganda friends in your family’s name at 50 orders.
- Subscriptions $50 and over are worth 2 subscriptions, $99 and over are worth 4 subscriptions and $189+ are worth 8 subscriptions!
- Top Seller chooses prize first!
ONLINE FAMILY REGISTRATION WITH FUNDERWORKS (name change from AP MAGS)
- Go to www.funderworks.com
- Click on REGISTER A PARTICPANT
- Enter ROSARY in the code field and submit
- Follow the steps to create the account
- Once account is created, familiarize yourself with the various selling tools available. These include avatars, e-mail blasts, printable flyers, social media, etc.
- Complete all steps needed to quality for the bonus incentive!
Student Gmail Accounts: This week, please help your child log into their gmail account. Their username is: child’s first initial, child’s last name dot 2026@holyrosaryws.org. For example: “kbenson.2026@holyrosaryws.org.” Hyphenated names include the hyphen in the account name. Passwords were chosen last year by students/families. Please have your child write down their gmail password in the designated spot in your child’s planner. After you log in, there will be an email invitation to Google Classroom. Please accept the invitation and do a quick browse through Google Classroom. We will be logging into Google Classroom in class this week.
Expectations Reminders: As we begin our third week of school, the students are building an understanding of our classroom/school rules and procedures. We will continue to practice and review. Every student in our class has a right to learn and work without interruption and enjoy school. The management plan is in place to ensure that every student in our class feels safe, included, and is able to work and learn without disruption. Our classroom and school rules are based on being SAFE, RESPECTFUL AND RESPONSIBLE.
When rules are not followed students receive (in the order):
- A reminder
- An individual conference/conversation
- Parent contact
Our goal is always to help students be responsible, respectful self-managers. Each new day is a new beginning. The less time we have to spend managing behavior—the more time we have for great learning! I will be holding students to high academic, behavioral, and social expectations. Thank you for your support.
Second Step: Our Second step lessons this week will review Empathy and Respect, and focus on Listening with Attention. Empathy is a crucial foundation for healthy communication and interpersonal relationships. Listening with attention is a skill necessary for effective communication with others and academic success.
Religion: We will be starting our study of saints in preparation for our saint reports and the All Saint’s Day Masses on (Sunday) October 31st and (Monday) November 1st. Each student will be assigned the saint that they will write their report on as well as portray during the Mass. To facilitate this project, we will need to compile the materials to send home for the students to start the report. This is a big project to organize, so we need to get started soon. Following is our system for determining which saint each student will have:
We have amassed a large collection of student friendly saint biography information on many amazing saints. When in the classroom we randomly passed out saints to each student, which works well. We do try to match students with their names if we have that saint. If there is a saint that has special meaning to your family that you would like us to consider, we ask that you email us this request no later than Wednesday, September 22nd. If we do not hear from you, we will assume that you trust us to make a great selection for your child. 🙂
Language Arts: I have been enjoying reading the My Favorite Place writing the students completed last week. These pieces are used as a beginning of the year writing assessment that I will reference to help me plan our upcoming lessons. The writing is also a good benchmark for the students to compare their progress as they grow as writers this year. Our class work this week will focus on grammar, punctuation, and cursive!
Social Studies: The continent and ocean test will take place this Friday the 17th. We will continue to review in class, and students are expected to practice at home as well. The test will have a word bank of the continents and oceans. Students need to know the locations. The 4A website has links to review the continents as well. Look under the “Map Skills” section on the right-hand links column. I will share these links with the students this week. The 4th graders are also memorizing the Continent poem which they all have a copy of in their filer. It is also available as a PDF on the 4A Website. I will give practice time in class for this, but the poem should be practiced at home as well. All students need to recite the poem by September 20th. Our lessons will focus on latitude and longitude as we gain skills reading maps using coordinates.
Science: We will be continuing our Project Lead the Way (PLTW) module this week! This module is called: Input/Output: The Human Brain. Through various activities, students will explore the brain with a culminating project where students will create a video or podcast highlighting concussion awareness. We started with the research phase this week, where students will find out all about the nervous system. 
Reading: This week we continue with our study of Folk/Tall Tales and figurative language. Ask your child about some of the words we’ve been studying with “Stormalong”: hyperbole, foaming, outcast, yearning, horrified, betray, condition, memorable, seafaring, shortage, tidal, character traits, tall tale. We also explored the exciting worlds of dictionaries and glossaries to find the meanings of these new words.
Spelling: The words this week go with our reading lesson on “Stormalong”.The words are homophones, so the students will need to be able to both spell and explain the meaning of each word. Word lists can be accessed on the 4th grade websites. The test will be on Friday, September 24th.
Math: Our classwork will continue to focus on place value. Fourth grade students are expected to be able to read and write numbers into the millions and higher. It is important that students be able to read large numbers as well as understand the difference between place 
and place value. (3,293: The 9 is in the tens place and the place value is 90.) Students will continue to receive daily homework that reviews the skills we learned that day. Please take some time to check over your child’s homework every weeknight.
Xtra Math: All students received a paper last week with log in directions for Xtramath. Please sign your student up for Xtra Math no later than Thursday, September 16th. We will start using this program in class on Friday. All instructions are on the school flyer, which was sent home last week. Check your child’s school/home section of the filer. Tip: Make sure you click “Enroll” (not sign in).
Habits: We will focus this week on the habit of perseverance. We will be studying the synonyms for this word: tenacity, persistence, determination…what else? 
HRS ROOTED IN COMMUNITY!
Thank you for your support of the Magazine Sale!
Have an excellent week everyone!
Ms. Benson