Poindexter Press for March 17th-21st, 2008

Dear Parents,
It’s beginning to get crowded and farm-like in here! The chicken eggs are here! They arrived Wednesday when the children were out for conferences and will be hatching sometime next week-if all goes well! Our tadpoles are doing well too-only one did not make it, so that’s much better than my track record last year, when they all died! ☹
I have also shared a website with the children so we can learn about Peregrine Falcons. There is a nesting pair that live here in downtown Indianapolis, and the Department of Natural Resources added a few cameras to their nesting box (high atop Key Bank on the 31st floor). As of Wednesday afternoon, Kenny and KathyQ have two eggs in their next box, with 1-2 more on their way soon! You can check out their progress from home too! Just go to the IndyStar.com website and scroll down a bit, on the left side you will see a heading for “blogs” and click on “Falcon Blog”. There you can read updates that are posted, the latest Falcon news and if you look to the right, you can click on the pictures and view the images from their nest. The kids love it and ask about Kenny and KathyQ all the time. We leave the images up on the TV all day, so they can see what happens.
Thank you so much to all the families who took time to make it to their child’s conference time this week. You will find your child’s report card attached to this newsletter. If you were unable to make it, please give me a call and we can have a phone conference or schedule a time to meet later.
During this short week, we have been “lucky”! Monday, we graphed and sorted Lucky Charms cereal in honor of leprechauns and St. Patrick’s day. We wrote sentences telling things we are lucky to have, and had a discussion about the difference between feeling lucky about having food, clothes, and a home, and feeling lucky about having video games, toys, and technology. The children read their sentences out loud and Friday, we wrote some down on sentence strips and cut them apart, scrambled them up and put them back in order.
We have also moved on to solving 6x6 Sudoku puzzles. The children asked if we could move on from the 4x4 size! We have also begun starting our day with a problem solving journal page. We gather as a whole group and work on simple addition problems, graphing, counting, and measuring. Kristen Poindexter ☺