Weekly Newsletter

Dear Families,
Welcome back to school and Happy New Year!
We have had a great start to the new year and it is wonderful to be back with the kids again. I think they were also eager to come back and to our classroom routines. They have done an amazing job, working, reading and writing together. What a terrific class!
I have some very exciting news regarding e-mail to share with you all. As most of you already know, we are very fortunate at our school to have access to e-mail for our young learners. Each student has his/her own account at our school, which is accessed through a student domain under gmail. This e-mail account has been created so your child can further his/her academic learning through various digital means. It is strictly for academic learning. As your child might wish to send e-mails to friends or family members with funny jokes, videos and forwarded messages, we ask that you reinforce the message we have at our school, which is to use this e-mail for academic subjects only. We encourage our students to share learning and thinking about books, academic subjects and things that go on in our classroom and at our school. Please do not forward jokes, videos and spam mail to your child. Thank you. Private accounts outside school are great options if this is something you and your child wishes to communicate about. We also ask that you speak with extended family members, grandmas and grandpas about these expectations.
Bonnie Birdsall, our wonderful Technology Integration Specialist, visited our classroom this week and spoke to the children about e-mail, internet safety and making good choices online. We had a very productive discussion. Creating a safe and meaningful digital culture takes time as we approach learning in many new and exciting ways. I will continue to work with the students daily as we define, re-define and learn what it means to be a safe and productive member of our new digital world. Stay tuned for more updates as we will frequently post about this very important topic. For now, the students will only e-mail me and their blogging buddies in Ms. Davison's class as we embark on a new unit together , studying Jan Brett. Stay tuned for more updates.
We were hoping that all the students would receive an e-mail from a parent by Friday next week. Please send an e-mail to your child with your preferred e-mail, asking about his/her day. Ask about what new learning is taking place, or what happened in Number Corner in math. The more specific ideas you present about the academic focus of the day, the easier it will be for your child to reply. Thank you.
Your child's email is as follows:
firstnamelastname@cssu.us

So, for example, if your child's name was Sara Smith, her email would be sarasmith@cssu.us

Please note the .us domain (mine, as all the other teachers' cssu.org)

I will email you regarding your child's password information. Thank you. Pictures from our first week will also follow.
Maria