November 16

Hey Families! Please take some time and look over some information for this upcoming week. I am excited that we have received our Chromebooks. This week we will go over important information about digital citizenship, how to properly maintain our Chromebooks, and our expectations as a class. As a reminder the end of our first trimester is this Friday.

This Week at Brown School

Virtual Scholastic Book Fair continues (through 11/25)

11/16-11/20 Stuff a Truck Food Drive @ Brown

11/17  Virtual PTO Meeting @ 7 p.m. (join us by clicking on this link)

11/18  Late Start Day (arrival at 9:45 a.m.)

11/19  Special Thanksgiving lunch in classrooms today!

11/20  Half-day of school- 12:34 p.m. dismissal (end of the first trimester)

Coming Up...

11/23  Positivity Project launches @ Brown!

This week's character strength:  gratitude

11/25 Report cards sent home with students

11/25 - 11/27 Thanksgiving Break - NO SCHOOL

Daily Wellness Check 

Thank you for your continued commitment to attending to our daily health screening linked here. If your child is exhibiting symptoms, it is imperative that you keep him/her home until healthy. Thank you for your support with this. 

We are collecting Box Tops at Brown this week. Please send them in with your child. We appreciate your support!

The Scholastic Virtual Book Fair is happening now! Please click here to learn all about it and click here to order directly.

Our Brown School Media Center receives a portion of the profits that go right back to purchasing new books for our students. Thank you for ordering!

Stuff a Truck Food Drive

November 16 - 20, 2020

CLICK HERE TO VIEW OUR COMMERCIAL

Brown School is proud to give back to the larger Berrien County community by collecting non-perishable (canned goods, boxed dinner/pasta) food items November 16-20. If you are able, simply pick up an item (or more) at the grocery store, and send it to school with your student to be donated. There will be a donation in the Brown School vestibule if SJVS students would also like to donate. We collect now because there is a greater need for food around the holidays. Thanks for spreading kindness and positivity!

This event is sponsored by 97.5 Y Country and Rogers. Items are donated to the Southwest Michigan Action Agency. 

Thanksgiving Lunch

We will have a very special school lunch provided on Thursday! Mrs. Punches and Mrs. Dokter are making a traditional Thanksgiving feast for our students! Please help us in planning for this event by pre-ordering your child's free lunch today.

We’re happy to partner with the City of St. Joseph to get feedback about their Parks and Recreation system. Please click here to take the survey before November 22nd. Thank you for your important feedback!

We may not be able to provide our students with the same experience that they have had in years past by providing a Lory’s Place group within the school, but there are some exciting opportunities happening for our students and families who would benefit from support through Lory’s Place!

The purpose of Lory’s Place is to provide grief support services for grieving children, adults and families.  Typically they partner with our schools to provide group grief support, but this will look a little different this year.  If you have a student who has experienced the loss of a loved one(s) and needs some support working through her/his grief, please contact our school social worker, Bri Van Hekken (bvanhekken@sjschools.org or 269-926-3520) for more information or feel free to reach out to Lory’s Place (269-983-2707) to learn about opportunities for support.  

Learn all about Lory's Place here.

Learning this week

ELA: This week we are starting on our next genre study. We will be looking at the key features of historical fiction and reading a variety of texts in the genre. Your student will also continue their work on finding the main idea and key details, along with focusing on summarizing historical fiction texts. 

Writing: Our class has done an amazing job working and completing their rough drafts of their Imagined Narratives. This week students will type their final copy of their narratives and publish them. I am very impressed with each students progress and hard work throughout the writing process.

Math: We will continue this week with our work on converting units of time and comparing and interpreting multiplicative equations. Students will work with a variety of word problems and number stories to identify the differences found in each problem. Our goal is to be able to look for the key words and information in each problem to find the most efficient way to solve. I stress once again to please ensure your student is practicing their multiplication facts daily.  Your student should have Home Links 2.1-2.5 finished last week. This week they will complete 2.6-2.9. 

Social Studies: This week we will complete our first unit of social studies by analyzing the different ways to think like an economist. Students will work on identifying how economist think by looking at; what products are being produces, how they are being produced, who is is it for and how much is being produced, along with the role the government plays in the economy. We will us the book Ox-Cart Man  by Donald Hall to help identify these questions an economist would ask. 

Have a fantastic week!

Mr. Hernandez