UPDATES for 3/14-3/18 2011

**Please send in permission slip and money for our Planetarium field trip ASAP. Thanks!
**REPORT CARDS went home Friday. Any questions at all---feel free to contact me.
**Tasty Dog Challenge appears to be a BIG HIT!! Thanks to all who participated.
**My class had some cool moves during the PBIS Dance Party with D. J. Mick.
**Come to Family Reading Night--Swap, Shop and Read on Thursday, March 24th from 6:30-8:00 pm. Have a snack and read with me!
**The Opera for the Young presentation of "Pirates of Penzance" was amazing! The students had a great time. It was highly visual with top notch singing.
**ZERO WASTE DAY is March 23rd. Bring your lunch in a recyclable/reusable container. Pack a healthy lunch. If you order a school, only take what you are going to eat.
**SAVE the DATE--Friday, April 15th, 6:00-8:00 pm--Centennial Celebration/Taste of Irving. What was is like at Irving School 100 years ago? Has it changed much? Find out from alums what the curriculum was like throughout the years. Bring a meal to share, hear the wonderful sounds of the Irving Chorus and view artwork from all the students at Irving. It is going to be great!!!!
**The annual ACADEMIC FAIR and EGG DROP contest is Wednesday, April 20th. Create a project about something that interest you. Create a vehicle that will prevent an egg from cracking when it is dropped from the 3rd floor window at Irving. I have asked the students to think about participating. What a great way to use thinking, predicting, researching, drawing, speaking, engineering, creativity, writing, art skills and more. Ms. Creehan will be speaking to our students on Monday to show examples and answer questions. Hey students, think about it--it could be a really cool thing to do!!!!!
**Spring Break--March 26th-April 3rd.
**Ms. Bell-Bey has compiled a big list of summers programs and camps in the area. If you are interested in seeing it please email me. It is really big and there is only one copy.
This week:
We examined the parts of a tuber (potato), looked at the eyes, viewed different varieties (purple!!), learned the history and view the flesh under a microscope. We are turning Peter's potato into a plant. No soil ---just water!.
Reading: We learned what an adjective was and how to use them in our sentences. We worked on drawing conclusions, comprehension strategies and sentence building. In our decodable book, "Hug a Bug," we discussed the idea of story extension--what could happen when we finished the story. How could the story be continued? Reviewing short u words, 3, 4 and some 5 phoneme words, word play activities and the introduction of a game where the students have to say where they hear a particular sound--beginning, middle or end, when looking at a picture were also part of this weeks activities.
Math: We began our Math Journals this week! The students are excited about listening to the story problem and recording the origin of the problem, illustrating the problem and writing the solution in number sentence form. We reviewed plus sign and equal sign terms. We continue work on counting on from a random number, time by the hour, writing 3 digit numbers and working with money values. Students played the "Piggy Bank" and "Mushroom Money" games.
Writing: We continue to work on upper and lowercase letters, paying particular attention to "dive down" letters, p, r, n. Students continue to write about various topics. We began talking about what a paragraph is and what the process is in writing one.
Science: We made frames for our silhouettes and posted our picture silhouettes in the hall. Can you tell where my shadow is? Check it out in the hall outside our classroom. Some very cosmic frames! We looked at our pictures of our "shadow dance." These will be the topic of our paragraphs. Stay tuned. We looked at where shadows fall in relation to the light. We observed their change in direction when the light source is moved. We talked about the sun. We learned about what it is made of, what impact it has on the planets and that it is a star. Next week--a shadow clock-sun dial and taking a look at the moon.
Literature: "Laura Ingalls Wilder," "1000 Facts about Space," "The Sun," "Solar Energy," "The Book of Stars," "Sun," "Dogs in Space," "The Sun is My Favorite Star," "Happy St. Patrick's Day, Clifford," "The Leprechaun Who Lost His Rainbow," "If You Were a Plus Sign."