Thanksgiving

I just want to thank all of the families in our class for your children. I feel so blessed this year to teach and spend time with each child in the class. I feel blessed to work with the staff and head-of-school at St. Matthew's. I am very thankful to have met all of the wonderful parents and siblings in our class!

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving Feast this year. A heart-felt thanks to all who helped arrange and set-up this event. An extra thanks to Connor's parents, David and Marcia and Faith's parents, Jackie and Eric, for their time. We had a successful food drive this year to benefit Hands for Hope. Now, we have the good fortune to turn our focus towards the Christmas holidays. Please take a look at our November photo album. You will see your children making their Thanksgiving turkeys and pictures of the Feast.

It is also important for me to give an extra mention of gratitude to Mrs. Mcgee. She took time to come and lead our class and Mrs. Bonura's class with the songs that we performed during the Thanksgiving Feast.

I will be sending home a December calendar on Wednesday (December....really?). We will have a short month due to the holidays and we will be very busy at St. Matthew's. As always, I am available by email if needed. Please check the blog as I will keep everyone posted on all the activities we are participating in this month.

Hands For Hope

This year St. Matthew's will be participating in HANDS FOR HOPE Thanksgiving Basket Event through El Buen Samaritano. We will collecting food items to create Thanksgiving dinner for families in need. Each class at St. Matthew's is responsible to bring an item to create the baskets for Thanksgiving dinner. We are asking each family in each class to bring the same item.

Our class' item is boxed mashed potatoes and packets of gravy. There will be collection boxes at school from Thursday, November 12 until Tuesday, November 17.

This is a wonderful opportunity to have the children experience giving to others. I will be talking to the kiddos about this in class. Thank you all for your support!

Scholastic Book Orders

Hi Parents,
I signed up with Scholastic Book Club so our class can order books online for discounted prices. I know with the holidays and birthdays coming up a lot of parents enjoy buying books. Scholastic has great prices so feel free to go online and see what is available.

Website: http://pcool.scholastic.com/parentordering/login.jsp
Our class user name is: MsCarothersClass
The password is: cluborders

You do not need to set up your own user name and password. Please use the one provided above. If you have any questions please email me or ask during the week. Under links of interest on the blog is Scholastic book order link and that will give you access to the website to view and order books for future use.

Also, a reminder there is no school on Friday. Have a wonderful weekend and I will see everyone on Monday.

November News

Mrs. Carothers and Mrs. Cully's class had a great Orange Day this year! The whole class went out to the Memory Garden and picked a pumpkin. We were so lucky that exactly 13 pumpkins grew overnight. The class did a great job painting their pumpkins and these will be on display during our Thanksgiving Feast and then ready to go home for each family's Thanksgiving dinner. We have had a lot of fun learning about bats, spiders and fire safety. We talked about squares, diamonds, red, black and orange!

Now we are ready to begin our November calendar. I cannot believe how quickly this year is going. This month our Fall Fun Unit continues with apples and harvest. Beginning November 9th we will move into our We Are Thankful Unit. I am sending home the calendar for more detail.

I passed out the Scholastic book order form last week. Please turn in the orders before November 23, 2009. You can also order online: www.scholastic.com under Juli Carothers at St. Matthew's Day School.

Here are some important dates to remember:

* November 2-5: Book Fair. New exciting news regarding this years book fair:
1) A "Muffins for Moms" event is on Wednesday and Thursday after drop-off and 2) a stunt for Francie to perform if we meet our sales goal of $5500 !

* November 5-7: SAES Conference in Houston. School will close at noon on Thursday, November 5 and no school on Friday, November 6. (I will be attending this conference and I am very excited!)

* November 9: Golf Tournament at Lost Creek.

* November 12: Parent Council meeting at 9:10.

* November 24: Noon release Thanksgiving Holiday.

* November 25-27: Thanksgiving Holidays.

* November 30: School Resumes.