**Congratulations to our own Yaya and Lottie for their participation is this years Spelling Bee! They were among the last kindergartners standing on the stage! Well done! Our alternate, Ben was very supportive to the participants. This is also the first time in our Spelling Bee history that twins, Yaya and Helen represented their classes!
** Our field trip to Adler Planetarium is this coming Thursday, April 19th from 9:00-1:15 pm. Please read all the information enclosed in the homework folder carefully. All students must bring a COLD LUNCH in a disposable bag.
**Let the creation and construction begin!!! All of our afternoons next week will be devoted to our Space Station Projects. Thanks so much for all the boxes and cool stuff. I may need some volunteers handy with a glue gun on Friday afternoon for the finishing touches. I will send out an email. If you still want to send things in--be my guest.
**Green Team will be selling "Sunny Notes" on Tuesday, April 17th at lunch time. The notes cost 25 cents. Send a sunny note to say have a great day to your family, teachers, siblings or friends. They will be delivered by the Green Team on Tuesday, April 24th.
**I have turned in all papers for students participating in the Academic Fair and Egg Drop Contest. We have some very interesting subjects to be studied! If anyone else is interested in participating....I can send information your way. Both will be held on Wednesday, April 25th.
**Student Council is sponsoring Parent Career Day on the afternoon of April 30th. Two of our parents are graciously giving their time. If you are interested in sharing information about your job, let me know.
**Schoolyard Project sponsored, "SOLARBRATION" will be held on Thursday, April 26th from 2-3 pm. We are going to create a picture of the sun much like our spelling of GREEN last year. Kindergarten students are asked to wear yellow or orange that day for the picture. More info will follow!
**Mr. Packer's small group lesson on visual spatial and visual perception patterning has concluded.
** In Friendship Club, Ms. Kwiatt explored the topic of feelings with the class. She read the story, "The Way I Feel," and conducted a discussion where students shared about when a certain feeling came over them and in what situations and how they handled that feeling.
**There is NO SCHOOL on Friday, April 27th--Teacher's Institute Day.
This week:
It was all about a few things. The students are getting very excited about the upcoming Academic Fair and Egg Drop Contest. There was lots of discussion about potential projects. I am loving it! Everything about space continues to be HUGE with students. Students are preparing for their field trip. We are also ready to begin prep for our small group Space Station Projects. We have talked about functioning as a group and the art of compromise. We will start on Monday getting together with our group and sketching out potential prototypes. Tuesday, we will put our boxes together and begin construction. Wednesday, we will paint the outside of our stations. Thursday and Friday will be devoted to detailing inside and outside. The students will be using the social, analytical, scientific and behavioral skills that they have learned throughout the year. It is TEAMWORK with a capital T my friends! They are ready for this challenge. The study of the moon was also of great importance. More about that in the science section. Station day activities included creating a topographical map of the moon, rocket math addition, 3 dimensional building with unifix cubes, space word search.
Reading/Social Studies: The students have completed Unit 8 Plants in our Treasures reading series. They will take their unit assessment on Monday. This week the students read and talked about what grows in a garden. Students thought aloud and accessed prior knowledge about gardens in their back yard and other gardens they know about. The students listened to the trade book, "Sunflower House." Many students noted that the genre was fiction. The students payed special attention to the story's beginning, middle and ending. They responded to the literature by making connections in their own lives to the process of growing a sunflower and seeing how big it can get. All students reviewed the target words here, little, said and was. They used the Rhyme and Chime to place a wikkie circle around each word. The students chose a partner and created sentences using words and pictures and read them to the other students. The students continued to review our target sounds Uu and Kk. The students also reviewed the use of adjectives and created a list during their journal time of adjectives that describe a sunflower. The story, "Sunflower House" was reread to the students and they contemplated aloud clues that helped them to draw conclusions about the story. The students participated in a variety of activities directed at phoneme segmentation, deletion and blending. The students were also able to work in small groups using the retelling cards to retell the story in their own words. The students read their decodable story, "Pick It!" They made predictions about story content and practiced their reading fluency. The students read the story to a partner. Robust Vocabulary included ARRANGE, TEND, BASIC, SENSES, GARDEN. The students listened to the expository text, "How Does Your Garden Grow?" They were able to retell important facts and identify the main topic. The students read their paper story, "Little Red." All students accessed prior knowledge and made connections to facts from our fall unit on Apples. Our workstations this week included drawing a garden map and writing about what you would plant in it, story read aloud and discussion of story elements and vocabulary, writing about seeds and plants using a sentence starter, reading a leveled story and completing a question and answer form.
Math: The students continue to work on the process behind subtraction story problems. They reviewed time by the hour and half hour as well as counting by 2's, 5's and 10's beyond 60. The students practiced reading and writing 2 and 3 digit numbers. Coins and their values were also revisited. The students began working on an activity called, "What's My Rule?" using pairs of numbers that are related to each other according to a specific rule. They infer what that rule is by examining pairs of numbers that are related according to the rule and then demonstrate their reasoning by generating additional pairs of numbers that follow the same rule. The projects on multi dimensional structures with marshmallows and toothpicks are great! We have big marshmallows, cereal pieces, colored marshmallows etc. Great effort and creativity.
Writing: Students are working to refine lowercase letters k, j, y, p, r, n, m. They continue to use the writing prompts from our Treasures Reading series. The Shadow paragraphs are on display in the hall. Check them out!
Science: The students pondered the question...what is the moon? They compared elements of the daytime and nighttime sky. They also found out that unlike the sun, the moon can be seen both in the day and the night. The students discussed the terms...sun rise and sunset. They examined the moon's topography looking at pictures. In an experiment, the students recreated the surface of the moon using flour, cocoa powder as the surface and then dropping marbles to create craters, "seas," (flat spaces) and mountains. Very cool! The students took a look at the different shapes the moon appears to make in the sky at night in the course of the month. It appears the phases of the moon repeat themselves like a pattern every month. In the world of space, the students viewed the 1969 moon landing and looked up information on Neil Armstrong on the computer. The students viewed several videos on launches of the space shuttle and apollo modules. Space is sure fun! Next we we take a looked at the planets, dwarf planets, current information on space and space travel. We will take our trip to the planetarium.
Technology: In science this week, students recorded the reading of their Shadow paragraphs on the app Storykit. (You are in for a treat!) In math, small groups of students worked with the apps Zombies and Math Dog (both addition and subtraction) and Symmetry in the app Geometry. The students continue to use the app NASA kids and Enchanted Learning to gain current information on our space topics. The students used a variety of apps they are familiar with during their choice time.
Literature: "The Moon Book," Eyewitness Books--"The Moon," "What the Moon is Like," "The Moon," "Finding the Moon," "Look for the Lorax," "Riddles About the Universe," "Moon Buggy," "Space Shuttle," "Un raza de la luna," "Billy Bean's Dream," "First to the Moon."
