**Congratulations to our Spelling Bee Reps--Angus and Will!! Sierra will serve as our alternate. These students will participate in the Irving School Annual Spelling Bee for K-2 on Wednesday, April 17th at lunchtime. Twelve of our classmates took part in the bee. It was a great show of interest, effort and courage. All of the students are to be commended for their great sportsmanship and support of others.
**Spring Break begins 3/23-3/31. Class resumes on Monday, April 1st. All students traveling near and far have their travel journals. Other students requested journals for home use. I can't wait to read about their adventures!
**Thanks for your response in getting all permission slips and money in for our field trip to Adler Planetarium. I will send confirmation to the volunteers. Currently, I have way more volunteers than I can take this time. On this trip, we are only allowed a certain number. I will have to make some choices. Don't worry--we still have more trips planned for the May. Thanks so much for your enthusiastic response.
**The Opera for the Young was a SMASH!!! Our students were a superb audience and the singers and performers in the production of "CINDERELLA" were spectacular! Check out our photo with Cinderella!
**There was lots of crazy hair and interesting facial hair observed during Spirit Week! Thanks Keyshaun and Ellie and the rest of the Student Council gang for a really fun experience! Don't forget if you are interested in speaking about your career to small groups of students--fill out the online sheet located on the Irving School Website. Parent Career Day is April 10th.
**Everyone smiled brightly for their individual picture on Spring Picture Day. A test pic will be sent home sometime in April with instructions for purchase.
**Sign up for the ACADEMIC FAIR and EGG DROP continues!!! I have a link to the online sign up form. Just click on the "click here for assignments" underneath my name and you will see it on the homework page. The class is getting really excited about potential projects!!!
**You can now begin bringing in your GIANT BOXES, medium and small boxes, paper towel and toilet paper tubes/wrapping paper tubes, cup tops, empty containers and any other COOL things you have been saving for our Space Station projects. YES--bring them in! Our space station prep, design, construction and detailing will be the week of April 15th-19th. We may need some hot glue volunteers during the detailing process. Stay tuned!
**We will have a new schoolyard/playground!! The school board voted unanimously on the project on Tuesday night. We will have a new turf soccer field, playground with totally cool equipment and a new parking lot. Demolition/construction will begin when school is out for the summer. This is a culmination of 8 years of planning, fund raising and raising awareness of safety about our current playground. It is a project that is very dear to my heart and I am so thrilled to see it come to fruition!
**Please have a safe and restful spring break! It is a homework holiday but....you can still read your Busy Reader, work on your project idea/vehicle idea for the Academic Fair/Egg Drop Contest, write and illustrate in your Travel Journal, log onto LEXIA or READING EGGS, play some of your homework games and Word Play, log onto Spelling City to review your word lists, get outside and exercise, try some yoga poses, observe nature and spend some quality time with family and friends.
This week:
It was all about the cold weather and students wondering how it could be spring! We still have our snow hills!! Students continued to wear their snow pants, boots and winter gear but did enjoy playing outside in the sunshine. Lots of COLD shadows observed! Our tubers are beginning to sprout. The students examined a piece of white potato and purple potato under the microscope. They made note of the similarities and differences in each specimen. Our Station Day activities included building pattern block 2-3 dimensional animals and counting the number of blocks used, making our frames for our side silhouettes and revisiting symmetry with our "egg symmetry" project.
Reading/Social Studies: We took a break from our normal Treasures Reading series. We will begin Unit 8 Plants after spring break. The students reviewed all their sight words thus far. They played word scramble, "fixed" wacky sentences, and created sentences containing nouns, verbs and adjectives. Game alert--Game alert!! The students played a variety of games in small groups to reinforce learned skills. "Puppy Phonics," (consonant blends) "Fall Fun Phonics," (blending sounds) "Build a Word," "Deep Sea Dive," (ending sounds) "Sight Word Match," "Pony Phonics," (vowel hunt) "Word Family Mats," "Spot-a-Word," "Very Silly Sentences," (reading and grammar) "Cosmic Critters," (consonant blends/digraphs) "Python Path," (word endings) were some of their favorites! Small student groups worked on 2 stories by the author Arnold Lobel. One group of students worked on the book, "Frog and Toad All Year Long." Their objective was to identify the author's purpose, study synonyms and work on retelling and story elements. Awesome reading aloud and discussion. Great participation! The other group worked on the story, "Mouse Tales." I read the story aloud and students concentrated on listening for key details, orally sequencing events in the story and working on story elements. All student groups then used a combination of drawing, dictating and writing to narrate a single event or link events in order and react to what happened. Very cool!! It was a great way to spend the week. Using decoding skills, discussing a story and thinking about details and question words was awesome. We continued on with our Haggerty blue book exercises concentrating on isolating vowels, blending, segmenting, adding and deleting phonemes in words.
Math: The students continued work on time and money. The also worked in their math process journals. Figuring out what process to use in a story problem is becoming clearer. The students are really listening for key words to help them with illustrating the process and writing the number sentence. Students continue to examine the relationship between 3 numbers--ie-3,4,7. The subject of even and odd numbers came up. The students learned what to look for when seeing if a number if even or odd. Students worked in small groups writing numbers 100-150, playing the "Plus or Minus Game," "Disappearing Train Game," and apps Math Bug Lite and Finding Sums.
Writing: We began talking about what a paragraph is. In its simplest form, a paragraph is a collection of sentences that deals with one topic. The students are going to write a paragraph about shadows when they return from break. We also discussed how their paragraphs could be realistic or fantasy. Formation of lowercase letters letters b,h,f was also reviewed. I am encouraging the students to write their first and last name on their assignments.
Science: The students continued their study of shadows, the sun and space. The students created their shadows as well as observed the shadows of their classmates during our sunny weather at lunch recess. they observed that a bigger shadow will "hide" a smaller one. They reflected in their science journal their ideas on which way a shadow will fall in relation to the light source. Hopefully when we get back from spring break, the students can continue their shadow exploration outside with shadows changing places and shadow clocks experiments. They will also use their shadows as a springboard for paragraph writing. Check out the student display on topic writing using what they know about the sun. Their sun collages are really cool! This week, we began to learn about the inner planets of our solar system. The students used internet as well as book sources. They are learning a song about the order of the planets. These 4 land planets are all very different in their surface, temperature and whether life can be sustained on it. The students questioned why Venus is actually the hottest planet but is farther away from the sun. It's those poison gasses that surround it and hold the heat in. Ask your child what he/she remembers from our discussions and presentation of information. Also check out our Silhouette Project on display in the hallway. Can you guess the shadow that goes with the side portrait?????
Technology: The students continue to use the iPad for small group and individual use. Vocabulary development apps have been the focus this week in reading. The apps Spelling Bug, Tic, Tac, Toe, Rocket Speller, AlphaWriter, Sight Words 100 were used this week. In math, the students continue their work with addition and subtraction processes with the apps, Mathland, Butterfly Math, Find Sums, Top It-Addition and Kids Math. In Science, the students are finding AccuWeather, NASA and Solar System to be very helpful with their questions. Labyrinth continues to challenge students with developing problem solving strategies.
Literature: "Mouse Tales," "Frog and Toad All Year Long," "Mercury," "Venus", "Earth." "Mars," "Hot and Bright," "My Shadow," "Nothing Sticks Like a Shadow," "Little Rockets Special Star," "Bear Shadow," "Chasing Shadows," "Cinderella," "Disney's Cinderella."
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