Saturday, January 19, 2013

UPDATES for 1/11-1/18 2013

**This week has really flown by!  The students are hoping for some snow but are excited about the coming frigid weather and experiments with ice!!   Thanks for doing a great job of dressing them appropriately for the weather.  Don't forget to send gym shoes on gym days!
**NO SCHOOL on Monday, January 21st in observance of M. L. King Day.  The students discussed the many accomplishments of Dr. King.  They listened to the "I Have a Dream" speech.  They made some connections in their own lives of becoming thoughtful, caring and peaceful adults.  All agreed that Dr. King really followed the Eagle Essentials in his daily life!
**All DIBELS assessments and midyear assessments have been completed.  The students are working so hard!  I look forward to sharing their progress with you at conferences.
**Conferences for my class will be held Monday, January 28th, Tuesday, January 29th, Wednesday, January 30th and Thursday, January 31st.  If you have not done so already, please confirm your assigned time.  I am in the process of working on rescheduling those who have requested a new time.  I will get back to you this week.  Please note--There is no class the afternoon of Thursday, January 31st and Friday, February 1st.  Dismissal will be a 11:00 am.  Hephzibah and River Forest Community Center pick up is at 11:00 am.
**Our 100th Day Celebration is fast approaching!!  No doubt you have seen the giant heart project that went home on Friday.  The students are so excited about this.  Our celebration will take place on Friday, February 1st from 9-11 am.   I have M. Schwager, T. Larnell, A. Struckmeyer, L. Banghart, C. Cummings, K. Jones, D. Frank and L. Pointer and Grandma who have volunteered to help.  The more the merrier!!!  Email me if you would like to volunteer.  The 100 item Heart Project is due Wednesday, January 29th.  Have fun!
**Don't forget to check the Irving website for info and registration on the Young Scientist Conference.  It will be held February, 23rd at Mann School.  It is a really cool conference for all ages--check it out!
**Please read the info on the 2 new additions to our classroom fun--Busy Reader Club and Word Play.  All information is located in your child's homework folder.
**In Friendship Club this week, Ms. Bell Bey worked with the students on a review of activities covered thus far on the topics of Feelings, Doing your Best, Personal Safety, Friendship, Conflict Resolution.
** In Mr. Packer Math Enrichment this week, Mr. Packer did a totally cool higher level thinking activity with the students using their ability to be detectives and look for clues when listening to a script and having them select or rule out pictures that will eventually help them solve the problem.
**A continued shout out for saving Giant Boxes and other cool stuff for our space station projects that will be done in April.  I cannot store them now.  Keep them until after spring break.  Thanks!
**Spelling City has been updated.  Remember, you can always access previous lessons.  We are moving into our First Grade words.
This week:
It continues to be about Weather and Water.  The students thought it was totally cool and a bit scary that ice had formed on all the playground equipment earlier in the week.  We all had to move to the blacktop at lunch recess for a few days.  Students broke off ice pieces to bring inside.  It did not take long for them to turn into water.  That solid-liquid thing....We kept a close eye on our iPad weather app to check the weather for the coming week----oh my----frigid conditions for a few days.  It is great for our next set of experiments-water as ice and bubbles.  Can't wait!  Our station day activities this week included snowman sequence, graphing and analyzing winter clothing, snowflake symmetry and color the code--ending sound review.
Reading/Social Studies:   The students continue to work in Unit 5 Animals in our Treasurers Reading series.  The students built background knowledge surrounding how an animal changes and grows.  They listened to the big book story," Animal Babies ABC's."  We talked about the word "expository" as meaning information about a subject.  Our story was an expository text.  The students made connections from the story about animals they had seen grow from babies to grown ups.  Many students talked about their pets or animals they had seen in the zoo or on t.v.  Some animal changes are pretty dramatic like tadpoles to frogs or very curious like a joey living in their moms pouch.  The students used the retelling cards to retell the animals story in their own words.  Our target word for this week was play.  The students added this word to their growing list of words and used them in the activity, "Walk Your Words."  They continue to work on the exercises in our Haggerty Blue Book.  They are so much quicker in their ability to segment, add, delete and substitute phonemes in words.  They continue to review the use of nouns and verbs in their sentence reading.  The students used their elkonin boxes to segment 3-4 phoneme words.  The students also used the boxes to place a marker in the box where they heard the target sound.  They reviewed the target sound on Ff at the beginning and ending of words and the vowel short o.  The students read their decodable story, "Can It Fit?" and made predictions about story content.  Our Robust Vocabulary for this week included FRAGILE, BELONG, SEVERAL, PARENT, INFORMATION.  The students practiced reading their leveled readers to a partner and receiving feedback in the form of a Reader's Checklist.   Some questions to pondered--Where you able to hear my reading?  Did I finger point to each word?  Did I stop at the ending mark?  Was my reading smooth or choppy?  How do I think I personally sounded when I read?  The students read the paper story, "We Play," and used it for fluency building.  The student listened to the read aloud story, "The Three Bears."  Many students commented that they had heard this story many times.  The students thought and responded about what would have happened if the bears had returned home early?  The students recorded some of their ideas.  Workstation activities this week included group animal sort and categorization using appropriate verbs, using the app Montessori Crossword to blend short o and digraph ch words and write a sentence to go with them, partner reading and discussion using the Reader's Checklist with support from the teacher and assistant, creating a topic collage using the sentence "We Play."
Math:   The students continue to work on counting to 100 and counting on from a random starting point.  They have begun working more exclusively with place value--counting by 10's, how many 10's in a number and how many 1's.  They are also becoming more familiar with counting by 2's and 5's.  They are loving working in their daily math journals.  They are beginning to listen more closely to the information given and the vocabulary used in order to determine if they add or take away.  Their illustration and analyzing through their drawings is really beginning to take shape.  They are starting to think about number families and ways to say a number.  In the activity "Plus or Minus," they used 10 pennies and listened listened to the directive to show how many to take away or add and what the resulting number was.  The students are in various stages of understanding---some counting penny by penny, some counting by 2's, some realizing that if they start with 10 pennies and the call is "minus 3" they calculate quickly via fingers or thinking with no manipulatives what the answer is.  It is fascinating to watch!!  The students also revisited symmetry and graphing and analyzing data in other activities this week. 
Writing:   The students are working on "Magic C" lowercase letters c, o, a, s.  They are continuing to use their mini boards and chalk/sponges as well as practice in their Orange Books.  They continue to use the prompts in our Treasurers series for writing practice.  This week the students wrote 3 sentences on the topic of their choice in their journals.
Science:   The students reviewed what they knew about WATER so far.  This week they worked with the question--what happens when you have a spill?  I spilled some water on a surface and student volunteers came up to "fix" it.  Kleenex, paper towels, regular paper, sponge, cloth were the tools they used.  They discovered that some of the tools were better able to "suck up" the water than others.  We discussed the word  "absorb."   The water was absorbed by some of the tools better than others.  Another Why?  Students remarked that the sponges and paper towels absorbed the water faster.   Students said that the sponges had holes in them and they observed the towels were bumpy.  A closer look under the microscope of the paper towel and sponge revealed tiny holes or spaces.  In Experiment 3, the students discovered that certain items have more holes or spaces than others and that lets the water "climb" up faster into them.  Students used paper towels in red water and celery in red water.  The water immediately climbed up the towel.  The students left the celery in overnight and discovered the tips and leaves of the celery were red.  WOW--foods have spaces for water to travel---We looked at the celery leaves under the microscope and the spaces very very visible--cool!  Question--What happens to your fingers when you stay in the bathtub a long time?  One students described it as "prune fingers."  Revelation--our skin has spaces where water can climb into!!!  In Experiment 4 the students experimented with the shape of water and concluded that water takes the shape of its container.  Students recorded their thoughts and sketches in their science reflection journal.  They continue to have great fun experimenting with objects in the water table and using the water tornadoes.  Next week--sink/float and water as ice.
Technology:    In reading, student small groups used the app Montessori Crossword for blending, segmenting and word building using short o and ch words.  Students also used the apps Rocket Speller and Reading Sight Words in their independent study.  The app Story Kit continues to benefit student small groups in the ability to hear their reading and discussions in order to build fluency and increase comprehension and participation.   In math, student small groups continue to use the apps Number Find, Top It Addition and Addition Bug independently and small groups to enhance their study of numbers and patterns.  In science, the students are using the apps Weather and Weather Underground to examine snow, ice and water patterns occurring in the United States and to track daily weather.
Literature:   "Martin's Dream," "A Picture Book of ML King," "Snowball Soup," "Footprints in the Snow," "A Drop of Water," "ML King Jr," "Martin's Big Words," "Winter," "Turn on the Faucet," "Slip, Slide, Skate," "Snow Dude," "Water," "The Words and Inspiration on Martin Luther King's Dream," "50 Degrees Below Zero."





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