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options offered to continue. We will be getting started in our D.A.R.E. program in March. The kids will meet with our local officers two times a week for the entire month of March. This will run throughout the entire month until graduation on a date to be announced.  With everything going on at this period of the year, we will continue working hard to pump our kids and prepare them for the Dakota Step test coming in April. We have a great group of kids in the fifth grade class and are excited to see how they test again this year. Bring it on!

• Speech ~ Mary Hempel
• What's a great way to encourage a child to pronounce sounds correctly? It's simple! Expose him/her to early developing speech sounds before he/she can even talk by reading books loaded with these sounds.  Have you ever talked to a child who substituted /w/ for /r/ (i.e.,saying "wed" for "red")? If so, you may have responded, "What's 'wed'?" For this you received a funny look and the reply, "Not wed. Wed!" Speech therapists commonly use a strategy with children with articulation and phonological disorders called "auditory bombardment." This technique repeatedly exposes the child to the correct production of mispronounced sounds. This increases the child's ability to hear incorrect sounds in his/her own speech. Reading sound-filled books to your child when he/she is a baby increases sound production and the opportunity to hear early developing sounds pronounced correctly.  Early developing sounds include p, b, t, d, k, g, and m. Often children will naturally omit these sounds from the ends of words or in the middle of multi-syllabic words. This is a common pattern in articulatory development. Just provide a good speech model by over-emphasizing the target sound.

• Physical Education - Lynette Grieve
• We finished our Basketball unit before Christmas. When we came back from vacation, we started a Tumbling unit. We learned and/or practiced log rolls, forward rolls, backward rolls, the crab walk, the bridge, sit-ups, and push-ups. We also learned and practiced how to do cart-wheels and head stands.
• We finished our tumbling unit and then started a Dance unit last week. We have had fun dancing the Twist, the Limbo, the Chicken Dance, and the Conga. This week we are dancing the Bunny Hop, Cotton Eyed Joe, and the YMCA. Next week we will finish up the unit with the Macarena and the Cha Cha Slide.
• When we finish the dance unit we will be doing stations of many activities. And when the snow finally melts, we will be back outside. 
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