Dear Parents of Rising Third Graders, June 3, 2011

I cannot believe it is already the end of the school year! This year has flown by! I am so thankful to be a part of the wonderful Christian Academy family! It is a privilege and a blessing to be on staff here. God is good!! I am so excited about meeting your child, learning with him/her, and growing in our knowledge of the Lord together. What a blessing this coming school year will be. I am truly honored to have the privilege of working with your child in third grade and am particularly excited about this group of students! It isn’t every day that you get to teach your own child and her amazing friends! Even though I know so many of you so very well already, I would still like to take this opportunity to tell you a little more about myself. My husband, Randy, and I will celebrate fifteen years of marriage this July and have been blessed with three beautiful girls. Kaelyn, our 8 year old, is a rising third grader at Christian Academy. Kyleigh, our spunky singer, is five and will begin Kindergarten at Christian Academy next year. Sweet Kara just turned two on May 18th of this year. God is so good to us! We love spending time together as a family with the pool and outdoor games being some of our favorite things to do together! We are members of the First Baptist Church of Myrtle Beach and enjoy serving in a variety of children’s programs there. I began my teaching career in the public schools back in 1995 after graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (GO ILLINI!). I taught Kindergarten, 7th and 8th grade Resource, 4th grade, 5th grade, and Gifted and Talented before staying home with our girls full-time. I joined the staff at Christian Academy for the 2009-2010 school year and am so excited about the coming school year and all the Lord has in store for us! Please find enclosed a copy of my supply list, wish list, a reading log, and an IXL log. Coming into 3rd grade, students are asked to read 20 hours over the summer. (That amounts to less than 15 minutes per day.) Enrolling your child in the Chapin Memorial Library summer reading program is an EXCELLENT way to achieve this goal. I will record an “A” as your child’s first reading grade when the reading log is given to me in August. I will also recognize those students who achieve mastery on the review skills listed on the IXL log over the summer. If your child masters each skill listed on the log he/she will have a much easier time transitioning into third grade math. (Even if your child mastered one or more of the skills listed on the IXL log during the school year, please have him/her take the opportunity to review that previously learned concept over the summer.) Also, feel free to move your child up to the next grade level on these skills if you find your child needs to be challenged even more, and please encourage him/her to complete additional IXL skills that are not listed on the log. Any skill your child completes can be added to the appropriate place on the chart. In addition, I ask that you practice basic fact recall with your child over the summer. The quick recall of basic facts is a crucial building block in mathematics. Knowing these facts by heart will make new concepts much easier to master. Try these websites for some fun ways to practice addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and problem solving: www.coolmath.com, www.abcya.com, and www.funbrain.com I also suggest that your child write during the summer. This writing may take place in many forms: journal writing, short stories, poems, books, etc. WHERE the writing is done (a journal/diary, plain paper, etc.) is not as important as actually DOING the writing. =) Your child can write about vacations, summer camps, fun days with friends, connections to what he/she is reading, or just anything that strikes his/her fancy! This should be fun and not laborious. I really want your child to realize that writing is a fun way to express our creativity, share our feelings, and communicate with others! Writing, math review, and summer reading are all highly valued and ensure a great start to a successful third grade year. All will be recognized and rewarded by the classroom teacher! I pray you and your family have a truly blessed summer! Enjoy some fun family time together! I am so excited about this upcoming school year! I look forward to seeing all of you at Open House!

Joyfully, Mendy Haldi