**Congratulations to our Spelling Bee Reps--Lottie and Yaya. Ben will serve as the alternate. These students will participate in the Irving School Annual Spelling Bee on Wednesday, April 11th at lunchtime in the Irving Auditorium. Fifteen of our classmates took part in the bee. It was a great show of interest and effort. All of them are to be commended for their great sportsmanship and support of others.
**PBIS Celebration Station--Our class participated in the FREEZE DANCE station on Friday afternoon. Great music and some very smooth moves! It was a great way to exercise and share our friendship! We came back to class to have some yummy cupcakes to celebrate Yaya's birthday.
**Spring Break is begins 3/24-4/1. Class resumes on Monday, April 2nd. All students who are traveling near or far have their travel journals. Can't wait to read of their adventures!
**Permission slips for our Field Trip to the Adler Planetarium will be sent out the week we get back from break. The trip is scheduled for Thursday, April 19th from 9:00-2:00 pm. I will need 6 volunteers for the trip.
**Please note the change in date--The Egg Drop/Academic Fair is now scheduled for Wednesday, April 25th. Can you create a vehicle that will support an egg as it is dropped from a third floor window? What are you interested in? Can you create a project out of it? Students are already sharing ideas about possible vehicles and projects!! Formal information concerning these activities will be sent out after break. What a great way to extend learning--aerodynamics--engineering--testing a hypothesis--answering a question--reporting on new found information---WOW! This could be great! Mom or dad can assist. Irving school has resources too. (Think Ms. Noonan, Ms. Gullo) Ms. Creehan will be coming to classrooms to share examples of projects and where to find more information.
**Bring in your giant boxes, medium and small boxes, paper towel tubes/wrapping paper tubes, cup tops, empty containers and any other cool things you have saved!! Yes, you can bring them in after break! Our space station prep, design, construction and detailing will be the week of April 16th-20th in the afternoons. We may need some hot glue volunteers during the detailing process. Stay tuned.
**Future date--Green Team/Schoolyard Project sponsored "Solarbration" Assembly will be Thursday, April 26th from 2-3 pm.
**Mr. Packer continued his small group lesson on shapes this week.
**In Friendship Club this week, Ms. Kwiatt read the students a story and then stopped in the middle and had the students discuss what they thought might happen at the end. The students then went to their seats and wrote and drew what they thought would happen. The students gathered back with Ms. Kwiatt to finish the story. Was their prediction correct?
**Our Wednesday assistant, Ms. Amanda, read a special story to the students about a new student at school who is different (in a wheelchair) and how he finds out he is not so different from the rest of his class. It was a great story on celebrating our differences and similarities.
**Please have a safe and restful spring break! It is a homework holiday but, you can read your Busy Reader (don't forget to record your story on your log), log on to LEXIA, play some of our homework games and Word Play that you have stored at home, go to Spelling City to review your word lists, get outside and exercise, try some of our yoga poses, observe nature, keep a travel journal and spend some quality time with your family!
This week:
It was all about our unusual weather, sun, fun, shadows and space! We were able to be outside and use the sun as our light source for our experiments. More about that in our science section. Our tubers are beginning to take root. The students examined a piece of purple potato and a piece of white potato under the microscope. They made a note of similarities and differences in each specimen. It was great to find out that some of the students are trying out the hydroponic process at home. Our station day activities this week included creating a collage sun, building pattern block 2-3 dimensional animals and counting the number of blocks used and making our frames for our side silhouettes.
Reading/Social Studies: The students began Unit 8 Plants this week in our Treasures Reading Series. They began by building background knowledge around how trees grow. The students talked about Oak Park and how there are so many trees here. They understood that a tree is a plant that takes many years to grow big. They also knew that a tree begins with a seed. The students listened to the Big Book story, "Oak Trees." The students noted that the genre was informational or expository. The students responded to the literature expressing that they had seen acorns (the seed) and some students even collected them. Once again they understood that it takes many years for the oak tree to grow big and that some oak trees are over 100 years old. Our sight words for this week are little and said. The students reviewed these words and all other sight words. The students noted that the word said does not sound like it looks. Our target sounds this week are short u and Kk. The students located Kk words and wikkie circled them in our rhyme and chime. We reread the Big Book story again. This time the students listened for the sequence---flowers-acorn-little tree-big tree. The student also reviewed the term, glossary and what it is. Small students groups took turns using the retelling cards to retell the story in their own words. Our puppet friend, Mr. Happy, helped model our blending practice using using our elkonin boxes. The students continue to work on blending 3,4, and 5 phoneme words. The students read the decodable reader, "Sad Hen." They made predictions about story content and orally answered comprehension questions at the end of the story. The students then reread the story to a partner. Our Robust Vocabulary included PLANT, GROW, CONCEITED, EQUAL and CHARMING. Our oral vocabulary story, "The Conceited Apple Branch," gave all of us a healthy new respect for the dandelion. Ask your child to tell you the story. The students listened to a poem called "Acorns." They discussed what the poem was all about and noted the rhyming pattern. Small groups of students used their word and picture cards to create sentences using their new sight words said and little. Like speech bubbles, the word said tells us who is talking. The students practiced their fluency by reading their paper story, "A Little Acorn." They also observed the use of "quotation marks," which also tells who is talking. Students practiced working with the word ending ck. They worked in their activity books. Workstations this week included, story reading/small group discussion and completion of the Story Chart, using the app Montessori Crossword focusing on short u and ck words for blending and writing practice, Short u cvc and word family sorts with partners and writing the rainbow with your sight words.
Math: The students continue to work on counting by 2's, 5's and 10's. Some students can count all the way to 100 by 2's, 5's and beyond 100 by 10's! Students began more extensive work on the process of subtraction. The game, "The Disappearing Train," was introduced. Students are also beginning to use the number line to assist them in solving story problems. Students continue to work on writing 2-3 digit numbers and telling how many groups of 100, how many 10's and how many 1's. They also worked in small groups on playing the "Plus or Minus Game," the apps Math Bug Lite and Find Sums. We also reviewed time by the hour. We continue with our daily process story problems in our math journal.
Writing: The students continue to work on writing prompts from their Treasures Reading series. This week we began talking about what a paragraph is. The students looked in books at paragraphs. In its simplest form, a paragraph is a collection of sentences that deals with one topic. The students are going to use their shadow photos as the topic of their paragraph. We also discussed how their paragraphs could be realistic or fantasy. The students spent time examining their photos and generating ideas about what they could write about. As a group, we wrote down the ideas and settled on a few basic questions that each one would answer. The students used that format to begin their writing. The students are learning to organize their ideas. Their first writing will be in a draft form that they can proofread to make corrections if needed. The students are working on their drafts.
Science: The students continued to study shadows. In Experiments 4 and 5, the students observed how a shadow changes due to the movement of the sun. The suns position in the sky changes due to the rotation of the earth. Yaya was our shadow maker throughout the day. At 9:00 am, we gathered outside to trace the shadow Yaya made as she stood. We marked that place and observed the shadow. The students went back into the room to rough sketch where the shadow was and how is looked. We did the same again at 12:00 and at 2:30 pm with Yaya standing in the exact same place. The students sketched the position and shape of the noon and 2:30 pm shadows. The students then reflected in their science journal their thoughts and drawings. Many student noticed that Yaya's shadow was long and skinny and right in front of her in the morning, shorter and and more to the left at noon and shorter and more to the side at 2:30 pm. The concept here is that the shadows change. In Experiment 6, each table of students constructed a sundial using paper, clay and a dowel rod. We looked at background information about what a sundial was and why it was used. It is one of the oldest measuring instruments measuring time of day by casting a shadow on a surface. Each table took their sundial out at 9:00 am, 12:15 pm and 2:30 pm. The students looked at the sundial as if it were a clock and thought about the numbers. In the classroom, the students drew a sketch and made an arrow where the shadow was cast. They then sketched a picture of what they do at that time of day. The students wrote about what they observed in their science journal. The students continued on in their scace study. We read stories about the sun and stars.
Technology: In reading, the student small groups used the app Montessori Crossword to sound and blend short u words and ck words and create sentences using some of their words, and students worked with a partner on the crossword section to locate letters to spell words. In math, students continued to use the apps Find Sums, Math Bug, Top It, Number Find and Coins in small group and individually to sharpen their skills. In science, the students continue tracking weather on the app Accuweather. They have become very interested looking up weather in other states and countries. Students have begun exploring the NASA space site app as we go deeper into our study of space. The students looked up some information on the sun to begin with. The students also looked on the internet for pictures of sundials and found that their were all kinds!
Literature: "Atlas of the Universe," "Sun and Moon," "1000 Facts About Space," "What's Out There?" "Sun and Moon," by Marcus Pfister, "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Clover," "Boom Zoom," "Sun," "Little Rockets Special Star."
