Saturday, April 21, 2012

UPDATES for 4/16-4/20 2012

**What a busy week we have had!  Our space stations are coming along fabulously!  The students are using their design ideas, thinking skills, creative skills and team work skills to produce a great, creative product.  We will continue to work on detailing through Monday.  Our field trip to the Adler Planetarium was so much fun!  The students had a great time exploring the different areas of the planetarium including the moon wall, Apollo Mission Room, Solar System area and the most fun of all--The Planet Explorers interactive room.  Many students tried on space gear, helped blast off into space, drove a lunar buggy, handled moon rocks, saw a space toilet and space food and slept in a space bed!  Thanks to our volunteers B. Chyna, C. Bravo, I. Henry, Yaya's Grandma, M. Chlebek, T. Naber and J. and C. Brock for their all their help.
**Please take a look at the "Solarbration" Activities for this coming week in the homework packet..  Don't forget to have your child wear YELLOW or ORANGE on Thursday, April 26th for our SOLAR picture.
**"Sunny Notes" will be delivered to students on Tuesday, April 24th.
**The Irving School Academic Fair and Egg Drop contest will be held on Wednesday, April 25th.  We have 8 students representing our class with projects.  We have 5 students representing our class with egg drop vehicles.  Come join us out on the blacktop on Wednesday from 12-1 pm to see the egg drop action!
**Irving School will have its Spring BOOK FAIR next week from 4/23-4/25 from 3:30-6:30 pm daily.
**Please take a look at the information on the TRAVELING POETS Project, under the direction of our own Ms. Noonan, located in the homework packet.   The students will also practice their poem in the classroom.
**Route to Reading Rotation 8 will begin on Monday, April 23rd.  This will be our last rotation for the year.
**Please send in the permission slip for our Eagle Wing Lunch at Barrie Park.  I will need 1 or 2 parents to walk with us.  We will go, weather permitting, on April 30th from 11-12 pm.
**Parent Career Day sponsored by Student Council will be held the afternoon of April 30th.
**Mr. Packer is currently doing a small group lesson on position and sequencing using specific vocabulary.
**In Friendship Club this week, Ms. Kwiatt worked on team building skills and sharing using games.
**There is NO SCHOOL on Friday, April 27th--Teacher's Institute Day.
This week:
It was all about our space stations!  Thanks to all who contributed boxes and other cool things.  The students were assigned a group and chose a group leader.  They set about drawing a prototype of what their space station might look like.  Each group listened to the ideas of its members to produce the drawing.  The students used their prior and new knowledge of space and space station design.  Our room was filled with boxes!!!  Each group had one giant box to begin with and they then gathered more according to their design.  The students needed to decided where windows, doors, hatches and spaces for telescopes were going to go and where boxes were going to be connected.  My job was to execute the cutting out of these spaces and to use the famed "gorilla tape" to secure each box in its rightful spot.  There was constant conferencing on my part with the groups.  Some students were quite particular about where boxes should be connected!  The students checked my work and then met to choose paint colors.  The students wore their special red paint shirts and they had a crash course in "painting 101" for maximum use of their time.  The painting began!  The students did a great job checking in with each other to confirm what color should be used where.  This process took two days.  On to the detailing!  The students had a variety of recycled items to use as details.  They had tubes, knobs, old computer parts, vacuum cleaner parts, jars, fabric, netting, ducting, paper, stickers and computer keyboards to use.   The students set about discussing what they would use.  All items were in a central location where student groups could get what they needed.  I had my trusty glue gun ready and with the help of my sidekick, Ben's mom, we made the rounds gluing where needed.  Students were detailing both inside and outside the station.  If you all could have been a flies on the wall.....lots of great, appropriate interaction among students checking with group members before proceeding with anything, asking for opinions, giving positive reinforcement and praise to members....so rewarding for me to see how far they had come as a functioning group since the beginning of school.  I am very proud of them!  We should be finished by Tuesday.  Please stop in and see them.  They will be in our classroom until the end of May and then recycled.
Reading/Social Studies:   The students began work in Unit 9 Amazing Creatures in our Treasurers Reading series. First up on our amazing creature list were insects and bugs.  The students accessed prior knowledge about what they knew about insects and bugs.  Is there a difference?  The students listened to the song, "The Ants Marching One by One."  They discussed the bugs and insects mentioned in the song.  I shared the Big Book story, "Beetles."  The students talked about expository or informational as being the genre.  The students made connections with what they knew about  beetles.  Our target words for this seek are he and she.  The students learned that these words are known as pronouns or nouns that can take the place of other nouns.  The students took turns using the pronouns, telling me about other pronouns they know and telling what noun they take the place of.  Our target sounds for this unit are Gg and Ww.  The students generated a list of both Gg sounding words (hard and soft) and Ww words.  The students used their Rhyme and Chime to point out pronouns he and she and words that begin with Gg.  We reread the Big Book story again, this time examining story details and working on classifying and categorizing skills.  The students took a look at the Index and Content pages and discussed what can be found on them.  Our puppet friend, Mr. Happy, assisted the students in activities in phoneme isolation, phoneme blending and phoneme segmentation.  The students read their decodable reader, "Bug in a Web."  They worked on comprehension questions from the story and then reread the story with a partner.  Our Robust Vocabulary for this week included ANNOY, FLUTTER, DISTINCTIVE, INSECT, INTERESTING.  The students listened to the Oral Vocabulary story, "Insect Hide and Seek."  They were able to access background knowledge as well as retell the facts of each insect.  The students worked with a partner to create sentences using their word and picture cards and appropriate punctuation.  Each students read their paper story, "He Said, She Said" aloud for fluency.  Workstations this week included writing about bugs using the pronouns he and she, matching insects to workers and writing a 3 sentence paragraph, reading appropriate leveled reader and completing the literacy activities on the back cover using the app Magnetic Letters and Doodle Buddy and emailing it to me, letter Gg and Ww sound foundation using the app Montessori Crossword. 
Math:  The students worked with sequencing numbers from 1-150, counting by 2's, 5's and 10's beyond 100 and time by the hour.  They are also worked with a partner on many of the new math apps introduced earlier this month according to specific skill level. All of our afternoons were spent working on our space stations.
Writing:   Students continue to reflect in their journal using the journal prompts from our Treasurers Reading series.  Most of their writing this week centered around their space station creations and field trip to the Adler Planetarium.
Science:  The students showed what they knew during their visit to the Planetarium.  Our unit on Sunshine, Shadows, The Moon and Space will conclude on Thursday. 
Technology:   In reading, the student small groups used the apps Montessori Crossword, Magnetic Letters and Doodle Buddy to complete assignments.  Individuals used the app ITALK to record fluency sentence reading and reading of vocabulary words.  The app Tic Tac Toe was used to answer questions on phoneme awareness.  In math, student small groups and partners used the apps Math Bug Lite, Addition, Monster Squeeze, Number Find and Number Dog.  In science all students used the apps NASA Kids and Enchanted Learning to find answers to their lingering questions.
Literature:   "Finding the Moon,"  "Children's Atlas of the Universe," "A Trip to Cape Canaveral," "Neil Armstrong," "A Walk on the Moon," "Space Travel," video-"Magic School, Lost in the Solar System," "The Dwarf Planet, Pluto," "Beyond the Universe."

No comments:

Post a Comment