**REMINDER--FIELD TRIP to the Planetarium on Tuesday, April 12th.
**Centennial Celebration/Taste of Irving--Friday, April 15th 6-8 pm. Bring a dish to serve 10-12 people. Last name beginning with A-L Bring an appetizer. Last name beginning with J-R Bring an entre. Last name beginning with S-Z Bring a dessert. Great fun for all!!!
**To start off our celebration week, a presenter from the Oak Park Historical Society will come on Monday, April 11th at 8:30 am. to speak to the students on the history behind Irving School and the south end of our village. He will bring drawings and artifacts.
**District 97 FUN RUN! May 7th t 8:00 am. at Lindberg Park RUN WITH ME!!!!
**Keep sending those giant boxes and other cool stuff for our space station construction. We will begin construction on April 18th.
**What a great response to Irving's Annual Academic Fair and Egg Drop Contest. Our class has 8 participants in the academic fair and 10 participants in the egg drop. Stop by the afternoon of Wednesday, April 20th to see it all! Students will also be in the gym on Wednesday night to speak about their projects.
**The Irving Annual Spelling Bee is THIS Wednesday, April 13th at 11:00 am in the auditorium. Come cheer on our class representatives, Alistair, Rylee and alternate, McKenna. The schedule is as follows: The bee will begin at 11:00 am. K -2 students may come to watch the bee. At 11:25 am., those students will go to eat their lunch. The bee will continue. As student representatives finish their part of the bee, they will eat their lunches in the auditorium. It will be exciting!!!!!
**Children's author, Marc Brown, of "Arthur" fame will be here on Wednesday, April 13th from 12:45 until 1:30 pm. to read/draw to our K-2 students. Thanks to Ms. Noonan for arranging this.
**Check out the new Irving Parent Resource wiki (under great resources on this blog). This is a tremendous resource containing many helpful sites for parents and kids. Our esteemed 3rd grade teacher, Ms Homann, researched sites and put this together. A giant THANK YOU to her for all her hard work! Enjoy.
**Check out Book Order info.
**Spelling City has been updated. Try Xtramath if you haven't or work on Lexia.
This week:
It was all about constellations! We took a much closer look at our night sky and looked for the star patterns or pictures we call constellations. We study what a star is and how they are not all the same size or intensity. We learned that all stars are not a white color but can be blue, red yellow and orange. The students were fascinated by the constellation names and the stories behind them that are rooted in Greek Mythology. One of our station day activities was to create our own constellation and name. Check them out in the hall outside of our room. Very cosmic!!!
Reading: We continued in our unit called, " Red, White and Blue." The students used sequencing frames. They independently read a decodable story and wrote what happened first, in the middle and at the end. We continued working on our questions and concepts for the word, patriotism. We investigated the use of proper nouns, abbreviations and continued our discussion on what an adjective is. We worked on our weekly WORD PLAY activity (see homework), oral and written comprehension skills, blends, digraphs and working with silent e. The students were introduced to a game called, "Silly Rhymes," where they have to construct a sentence using rhyming words, verb, adjectives and articles. It can get pretty silly!!!
Math: What is subtraction? was the question of the week. We worked on the subtraction process in our math journals and began to listen for specific words in our story problem that would tell us if we needed to subtract, take away or "minus" something. We worked on counting down from random numbers, wrote our numbers from 0-50 on our number grid, played the plus or minus game, the disappearing train game, and continued our work with place value. We revisited the world of 3 dimensional structures. This time we used marshmallows and toothpicks to create our dimensional structures. Can't wait to see what they create for their homework project. We will set up a multi-dimensional museum in our classroom.
Writing: We continue to respond to literature we have read in class. The students are working hard at refining their upper and lowercase letters, spacing and placement of letters and punctuation. We are composing 3-4 sentences.
Science: We worked with a shadow clock or sundial. We read about the history behind unsing the sun to mark time. Each table group observed their sun dial at different parts of the day and reflected their observations in their science journals. We experimented with solar paper. Each student placed an object on their solar paper and placed it outside in a sunny spot. They checked it after an hour and recorded what they observed and why they thought happened. We checked out the different pictures of the moon's phases. We made a topographical moon with packing peanuts and aluminum foil.
Literature: "The Heavenly Zoo," "Seeing Stars," "Children's Atlas of the Universe," "Space Race," "Shooting Stars," "Mercury and Venus," "The Solar System," "Stars, Stars, Stars," "The Story of Betsy Ross," "The American Wei," "To Root, To Toot to Parachute--What is a verb?" "If You Were a Minus Sign."
