**Please send a potato of your choice to school on FRIDAY, MARCH 16th for our Super Tuber Activity. Yes---a potato! Do not cook it!!!! We will learn its history, examine, perform some graphing exercises, measure, look for its "eyes," take a look at different varieties and learn more about its connection to Ireland. I still need 1 or 2 more volunteers in addition to our regular station day helpers M. Meagher and H. Hamblin. Email me if interested.
**"Everybody Rocks" performance featuring our own Linsday and Alex will be on Tuesday, March 13th at 2:20 pm in the Irving Auditorium.
**Continue to bring gently used books in for Swap, Shop and Read that will be held Thursday, March 15th from 6:30-8:00 pm. It is a great way to spend a family evening, choose great books and have a treat or two!
**Future Field Trip to Adler Planetarium on Thursday, April 19th from 9:00-2:00 pm. More info will follow soon.
**Report Cards go home next Friday, March 16th. Trimester 2 has concluded. We have now begun our third and final trimester. Can you believe it!!!!
**OPERA for the YOUNG is Tuesday, April 3rd from 9:30-10:30 am in the gym. The story of "Hansel and Gretel" will be sung with audience participation.
**Spring pictures will be taken on Tuesday, March 20th.
**Spring Break is 3/24-4/1. School will resume on Monday, April 2nd. Please let me know if your child needs a travel journal.
**It's PACK WEEK! Wear and pack the color of the day in your lunch. Think fruits and vegetables!!! We are encouraging all students to "Eat the Rainbow." The school lunch program will also be participating. Monday-pack and wear Purple. Tuesday-pack and wear White. Wednesday-pack and wear Red. Thursday-pack and wear Yellow/Orange. Friday-pack and wear Green.
**All School Annual Spelling Bee is Wednesday, April 11th from 11-12:00 pm. More info soon.
**Future Event--Academic Fair and Egg Drop Contest--Friday, April 20th. Do you have something you are really interested in? Can you make a project out of it? Can you construct a vehicle that will keep an egg from breaking when dropped out of a third floor window? Questions to ponder. More info on these events coming soon.
**All School PBIS Celebration is Friday, March 23rd from 1:30-2:30 pm throughout the school.
**Mr. Packer did a cool project with the LCD projector on what it takes to solve riddles. Think of Mr. Packer's "hints" when working on the "Mystery Number" in challenge math!
**It is getting closer to collection of giant boxes and other cool things for our space station station projects. Keep saving them!!! You can bring them in after spring break.
This week:
It was all about the start of our new theme, "Space." We are slowly transforming our classroom into a space workshop. The students are exploring the different items on our Space Table. Natalia helped spark further interest by bringing in a pop up Space Book. The current events of the week peeked our interest with the mention of a "solar flare" possibly disrupting things on earth. The students gathered information from internet sources. On our IPADS, the students accessed information and pictures from NASA . While it didn't amount to much, the students now know where solar flares come from and what they look like. We have begun to study what makes a shadow. More about that under the science heading! Station Day activities included an estimation activity, pattern block sponge prints, creating Mr. Clown Clock and moving his clock hands to the rhyme and tracing our face silhouette.
Reading/Social Studies: The students continue to work in Unit 7 Weather in our Treasures Reading Series. This week, students built background around the idea of seasons or certain times of the year and the different activities and ways people and animals relate to them. The students listened to the Big Book story, "In the Yard." They made predictions about story content by reading the title and looking at the cover picture. The students explored the concept of genre or what kind of story it was. Through their library sessions with Ms. Noonan, the students have begun to work with classifying stories by type or genre. This story is realistic fiction. The students identified the setting and also the BIG idea of the story. They made connections in the story about their own activities they do in their back yard with their families.
The sight words and and what were introduced this week. We looked for them in our rhyme and chime and circled them. The students added them to the rest of their sight vocabulary and they played, "Hands Up, Hands Down." The students continued to work on target sounds Bb and Ll both at the beginning and the end of words. The students worked on reviewing what an adjective does to a word. (it further describes it) They took turns using an adjective to further describe some of our picture cards. (ie- big bike, juicy watermelon) The students brainstormed a list of verbs to describe what they can do in each season. We reread the story again focusing on the setting and making inferences about its content. Students took turns using the retelling cards to retell the story in their own words. Our puppet friend, Mr. Happy, helped guide us in our phoneme blending exercises using our elkonin boxes. The students read the decodable story, "Hot Ben, Hot Lin." They reviewed their target sight words and made a prediction about story content. We worked on comprehension strategies. The students each reread their story to a partner and shared questions and answers about the story. Robust Vocabulary for this week included the words MONTH, SEASON, SHIVER, MILD, WARNING. The students listened to the folktale, "Paul Bunyan and the Popcorn Blizzard." They compared and contrasted what occurred in each season. They sequenced events in the story. The students listened to the informational text, "A Year With Bears." The students contributed much prior knowledge being quite the experts in bear knowledge! As they listened to the content, they commented and added more facts. The students read aloud the paper story, "What do I Have?" They reviewed story elements and critiqued their own reading aloud. Could everyone hear them? Did they stop at the end of a sentence? Did their voice go up slightly as they read a question? Was their reading smooth or choppy? Could they sound out words they did not know? Were they honest about their reading? The students listened to the Native American tale, "How the Turtle Flew South for the Winter." Why did the turtle have to fly south? Why couldn't he walk? Why did the author tell this story? Ask your child these questions. The students finished the week with new Word Play letters and script. Try it this weekend if you haven't already. Workstations this week included word sort with short e word families and cvc sort short e, read it and add to it-write and illustrate, writing question and statement sentences and illustrating, creating a seasonal jobs chart using verbs and pictures and recording your own reading of a story and playing it back and critiquing yourself via the Reader's Checklist and work in the activity book.
Math: The students revisited the color and shapes in their pattern blocks designs. They reworked various puzzles and created new ones. The students continued work on coins and their values. We have worked on penny, nickel and dime and have just introduced the quarter. They worked on the activities Penny Grab and Coin Exchange and the game Mushroom Money was introduced. We continue to work on time by the hour. We have begun using our math process journals. Each day I read a different story problem. The students listen to the story. They then record in their journals the topic, illustrate with drawings the process, write the number sentence and record how they arrived at their answer. One student is chosen to record on the board and we discuss and make corrections as needed. The students are really beginning to listen more consistently for information in the story to determine whether they add or subtract.
Writing: The students continue to work on refining the lowercase letters that were introduced in the last 2 weeks. Each student is writing from 2-4 sentences using the journal prompts from our Treasures Reading Series. Some students are beginning to add adjectives so their sentences have become more descriptive in nature. All students continue to refine sentence structure. Do I begin with a capital letter? Did I name and tell? Did I capitalize a proper name? Do I have an ending mark? Did I space between words in a sentence? Did I place my letters properly on the given line? Lots to remember!!!
Science: The students began a unit in science called, "Sunshine, Shadows and the Moon." They used the overhead projector to create various shadows of themselves and other objects. I posed the questions--How are these shadows made? Do we need certain elements before we can have a shadow occur? I recorded ideas that the students had on this subject. All students agreed that we needed some kind of light source. Other students noticed that either a body or some other object was blocking the light. One student remarked that we needed some kind of area to see the shadow. The recipe for a shadow became light source, object to block the light and surface in order to see the shadow. Some students noticed that some shadows were totally black, while other shadows were light color or gray. Why is that? (Can the light pass through an object?) The students began work in their science journals. The students thought about how the whole universe was made. A very interesting conversation began about beliefs, bible stories, scientific ideas, big bang theory---wow! Thoughts and ideas can get pretty heavy here in kindergarten!! We all agreed to respect all beliefs and ideas. We reviewed the concept of what makes day and night. We also talked about how the nature of space is always changing as new things are always being discovered. (new planets, dwarf planets) Stay tuned-- we are just beginning our study!
Technology: In reading, individual students practice read and then recorded their reading with the app Story Kit. They then played it back to see how they sounded. Students worked independently in small group with the app Montessori Crossword focusing on either short e words, ck ending words or digraph wh. In math, the student small groups continue to use the app Number Find to develop knowledge of number patterns and place value. In science, we checked the weather app for the weeks forecast. The students also used the app Enchanted Learning to look up information on clouds and solar flares. A small group of students explored the app Coins which involves counting coin quantities. Small groups of students also revisited the apps TanZen and Labyrinth for extra brain work!
Literature: "Magic School Bus Lost in the Solar System," "What Makes Day and Night," "Big Tracks, Little Tracks," "Guess Whose Shadow?" "Bears Loose Tooth," "Clocks and Calendars," "I Can See My Shadow," "Hop On Pop," "The Eye Book," "Lightning," "Never Give a Fish an Umbrella," "Rain," "Big Bang," "A Pop Up Book of Space."
