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someone they have not seen in awhile. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please contact me at school and I will be more than happy to help or answer any of your questions.
• Mr. Dan Dalchow ~ Principal          Groton Area Elementary School                   Elementary Phone # 397-2317                 E-mail:  dan.dalchow@k12.sd.us

• Junior Kindergarten - Julie Milbrandt
• In Junior Kindergarten we have been very busy.  We continue to work on the learning the letters of the alphabet and the sounds that the letters make.  We are also getting very good at "reading make-believe words.  You may wonder why we would practice nonsense words.  The reason is simple, if we can take the letters  j - e - g and "read" it as jeg (which rhymes with leg), we can apply those skills to any words that we come across.    Our math skills are coming also.  We keep practicing counting and number recognition, we daily practice patterning and days of the week with our calendar activity. 
• We love when we get to do science experiments … especially the ones that involve making food - pancakes were especially tasty.  We also experimented with friction and figuring out which things will roll, or if there was too much friction and they just slid down our ramp.
• We love having visitors and if you ever want to check us out, feel free to stop in.  We will probably engage you in what we are doing in the classroom, so come in ready to have some fun.

• 1st Grade ~ Emily Eichler & Shauna Deiter
• Another month is flying by and the first graders are learning so much before our eyes! We have had a very eventful year and are excited to share what we have been learning since our last update.
• Reading class is made up of skill practice and reading amazing stories by awesome authors and illustrators. Our daily skill practice has helped us learn about the long sounds of u, o, i, e, and a. There are about four or five ways to make these sounds through different letter combinations. We have learned to 136 new high-frequency words so far this year. That is a lot of new words, especially since we still have three more months of school left! We have been reading a wide array of stories in our reading textbooks and have a hard time deciding which story is our favorite so far. We work on making predictions, finding the main idea and details, drawing conclusions, comparing and contrasting, and retelling every time we read a story. Discussing all of this helps us become great readers!

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