**The Centennial Celebration/Taste of Irving was loads of fun!! I learned so much more about Irving School from the alumi who came. It was so great talking with them. They shared many stories with me about the building, teachers, curriculum and antics of the 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's. They were very sad that we no longer have our loft and fish pond. I was thrilled to see many former students and especially elated to chat with a former student and his family. That student is now 27 years old!! What a great evening for all. Please stop by to see our NOW and THEN thoughts and read our If I Lived 100 Years ago sentences.
**NO SCHOOL--Thursday, April 21st, Teacher's Institute and Friday, April 22nd.
**RUN WITH ME on Saturday, May 7th at 8:00 am. See information in homework packet.
**THANK YOU to S. Oufkir, D. Donaldson, T. Zurawski and A. Baker for volunteering to help on our Planetarium field trip. We had an awesome experience and a great day.
**We have our boxes for our Space Station projects. Our groups are set and our prototypes are drawn. We will be working on construction, painting and detailing all next week and some of the following week. Any cool things for details, send in on Monday. It can get messy, so have your child wear clothing that is not special.
**CHANGE IN DATE: Please note that the Academic Fair and Egg Drop has been moved to the following week--Wednesday, April 27th. More time for ideas and research!
**SPELLING BEE NEWS--Congratulations to Rylee and Alistair!!!! They were the last kindergarten participants standing at the Spelling Bee!!! 2nd grader, Bodie, first grader, Andrew and 2nd grader, Robin received 1st, 2nd and 3rd place respectively. It was exciting to watch!!
**Author, Marc Brown was a smash hit at Irving on Wednesday. We learned about his life and how he comes up with ideas for his books. We learned how "Arthur" came to be. Marc read his newest "Arthur" story to the group. We had a very cool photo taken of Marc Brown with our class.
**The 31st Annual Ethnic Festival is Saturday, May 7th from 10-3 pm at Julian Middle School.
**Keep reading those Busy Readers and keeping your log. Our classroom goal is to have every child complete 1 log.
**Family Math Night is Thursday, April 28th from 6:30-8:00 pm. This years focus is called, "Who done It?" Let's collect, decipher and solve the mystery.
**We have started a school wide Ultimate Vocabulary Challenge. This weeks word was REPUGNANT--offensive, disgusting, awful. Our class used the word in sentences 20 times this week! (That smell was repugnant.) Wonder what next weeks word will be? If you have an interesting word--write it down and bring it in. I will submit it to Ms. Chinn.
**Homework packet is in their backpacks.
This week: It was about 2 things--Our field trip to the Planetarium and Preparation for the Centennial Celebration. We had a beautiful day for our trip. We saw a cool movie called, "One World, One Sky." Our friends, Big Bird and Elmo showed us the night sky, stars and constellations and pointed out how even across the world in China, what we see in the sky is the same. We enjoyed looking at the exhibits in the Solar System Room. The students loved making a crater and checking out the Mars and Adler Rovers. We looked at the chart with all the planets and learned that most of the planets had more that one moon and the moons were named. We saw part of a meteorite from the the Meteor Crater in Arizona. The Planet Explorers interactive
room was blast! The students tried on space gear, worked on the rocket, blasted off in a simulator, went to planet x and crawled through tunnels, drove a lunar rover and played with space rocks. We had a lovely lunch outside near the beach. We prepared for the Centennial. The students looked on the internet at the history of South Oak Park. A representative from the Oak Park Historical Society came to speak to classes about what it was like in Oak Park in 1910 and what Irving School looked liked. What, no playground! Look how small our school was. We did not see very many trees. What did kids do back then? What, no Nintendo!!! It was an eye opener for many. I photographed what our school looks like now. We all were amazed at the growth and size of the our building throughout the years.
Reading: We continue to work on Unit 6. We took our sequencing frames a step further. The students did not preview their decodable story this time. They did take it back to their seats and read it on their own and filled out the sequencing frame. All Independently!! We are really moving into the first grade mode. We continue to work on pointing out the beginning, middle and ending of a story as well as the main idea. We reviewed all of our sight vocabulary and used them in sentences. We worked on our fluency. We worked on blending 4-5 phoneme words, adding and deleting word parts, WORD PLAY activities and blends and digraphs.
Math: We continue to work on the process of subtraction. The students are really beginning to recognize the specific words in our story problems that indicate you are going to subtract. We continue to work on reading and writing 2-3 digit numbers, counting to 120 and reviewing geometric solids. The students brought in some really creative multi dimentional projects. Stop by and check our Structural Museum. We played the plus or minus game with pennies. It was interesting to observe students' counting strategies (one by one, grouping by 2's and 5's, visually performing the process.)
Writing: We continue to work on reflecting in our journals, refining our upper and lowercase letters, spacing between words in a sentence and position of words on a given line.
Science: We reflected on our field trip. We continue to discuss the phases of the moon. The students continue their fascination with the stories behind constellation names. We are loving those ancient Greeks and Romans! We made star gazers on station day and are waiting for a very sunny day to use them. The students read about and discussed the land planets and gas planets with accompanying facts about their moons and geography. The students have now formed their groups for their space station projects. They worked Friday morning discussing and sketching their space station prototype. Work will begin on Monday.
Literature: "D. W.'s Guide to Perfect Manners," "Billy Bean's Dream," "Asteroids, Comets and Meteors," "Sleepy time Olie," "Jupiter and Saturn," "Planets--True or False," "I Want to be an Astronaut," "Once Upon a Starry Night," "The Book of Planet Earth," "First on the Moon," "Stories of the Stars," " Uranus and Neptune."
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