**Please send a potato of your choice to school on Friday, March 15th for our Super Tuber Activity.
Yes--a potato! Do not cook it!! We will learn its history, examine it closely, perform some graphing exercises, measure it, look for its "eyes," take a look at different varieties and learn more about its connection to Ireland. We will also choose one to grow! I could use 2-3 volunteers to help with this activity. We will do it on Friday morning at 9:30 am. The activity will last about 45-50 minutes. Email me if you can help.
**In our bingo mania on Friday, the student clown clocks and decodable paper story didn't make it into your child's homework folder. Those items will be there on Monday.
**Keep sending in permission slips and money for our field trip to ADLER PLANETARIUM. I would like all money in before spring break to secure our spot. The trip is Thursday, April 11th from 9-1:30 pm. Students and teachers will be riding the bus. Volunteers will carpool. Directions will be provided.
**Report Cards will go home on Friday, March 15th. The report card envelope will also contain some information on Common Core Standard activities we have been doing in the classroom and more information on the new standards that will take effect in 2015-2016.
**This coming week is PACK WEEK! Wear and pack the color of the day in your lunch or snack! Think fruits and vegetables!! We are encouraging students to "Eat the Rainbow." The school lunch program will also be participating. MONDAY--pack and wear GREEN. TUESDAY--pack and wear WHITE. WEDNESDAY--pack and wear YELLOW/ORANGE. THURSDAY--pack and wear PURPLE. FRIDAY--pack and wear RED!
**Will's mom, Nurse Smith, is coming Friday, March 15th at 1:00 pm to do a program on GERMS! Cool!
**Opera for the Young presentation is Thursday, March 21st in the gym at 9:30 am. This year's presentation is "CINDERELLA." It is pretty cool. The students are learning a group part during their music time.
**Spring Pictures will be taken on Monday, March 18th. More info will follow.
**Our PBIS All School BINGO game was so much fun! We played along side our Book Buddies which doubled the fun! Looking for the letters and 1 or 2 digit numbers was great for our hand eye, visual spatial and visual motor coordination. We even had 2 of our own kindergarten winners--Sophie and Amare! Our next Book Buddy get together will be in April.
**Everyone looked that they were enjoying themselves at the Taste of Irving on Friday. I heard the food was great! I made it to see the band which sounded awesome!! Did I see some very smooth Room 110 dancers and parents??? Go Isabella , Angus and Vivian!
**Future Events---The Academic Fair/Egg Drop Contest has been moved to Tuesday, April 16th. The K-2 Spelling Bee is Wednesday, April 17th. More info will follow soon. Great opportunity to participate!
**School is closed for spring break--March 23-31. Classes resume on Monday, April 1st.
**Mr. Packer continues to work with small student groups on follow directions and being a detective and looking for clues and details.
**It is almost time to bring all the GIANT boxes and COOL stuff you have been saving for our space station projects. You can start bringing it in after spring break!!!
This week:
It was all about Shadows and the beginning of our Space cross curricular theme. We will save the shadows part for science down below. We are slowly transforming our classroom into a space workshop. The students are exploring the different items on our Space Table and are encouraged to bring in items of their own. Students have begun bringing in books with great information. The students began with an inquiry discussion about what they know about space. What is in it? How did we the Earth and other planets? What is a universe? Wow--lots of thinking going on! Station Day activities this week included Mr. Clown Clock, tracing our face silhouette and creating a mixed media sun.
Reading/Social Studies: The students continued to work on Unit 7 Weather in our Treasures Reading series. This week, the students built background knowledge around the idea of seasons or certain times of the year and 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 book cover picture. The students identified the setting and also the BIG idea or MAIN idea of the story. They made connections in the story about their own activities they do in their back yards with their families. The sight words and and what were reviewed. We looked for them in our rhyme and chime and circled them. The students continued to work with target sounds Bb and Ll. The students did an activity where they listened for the targeted sound and told if it was at the beginning or ending of the word. 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 picture cards. (big bike, juicy watermelon) The students also reviewed the function of verbs. (show action) They came up with a list of verbs to describe what we can do in each season. The students took turns retelling the story. We took a break from our elkonin boxes this week and "jumped" segmented 5-6-7 phoneme words. Lots of movement! The student continue work in the Haggerty Blue Book--this week's focus was on adding, deleting and substituting sounds to create words.
This week, the students worked on a specific Commom Core Standard and produced an assessment sample. Our school district is exploring ways to assess these standards and each grade level has discussed a particular way. Our Kindergarten team is using Dr. Seuss books to assess Standard W.7--Participate in shared research and writing projects. Our assessment prompt was--explore a number of books by a favorite author and express an opinion about them. The students selected 5 books. I read each one aloud. The class created a story board where they collectively told the story elements of each story. The key story elements were reviewed--Title, Setting, Characters, Plot, Details, Main Idea. I recorded their information of each story on the story boards. We defined the word-opinion. (What is your favorite story? Why is it your favorite?) This activity was done over a 4 day period with their assessment on Friday. These assessments will be shared at our district level kindergarten meeting in April. There will be 3 standards and assessments total this year. All students expressed much orally. It was interesting to read their written comments.
Workstations this week included small group literature discussions and read alouds with leveled readers focusing on story elements and question words, using the Reader's Checklist for fluency, word sort with short e word families and cvc sort with short e, activities with consonant blends and digraphs, comparing and contrasting your house in summer and in winter using illustration and writing, use of partner and small group board games and iPad activities with focus on vocabulary development, phonemic awareness and phonics skills and working with finding details in a given story.
Math: The students revisited the color and shapes in their pattern blocks. They also reviewed recognition of geometric solid shapes. They created puzzles at various levels. The students continued the study of coins and their values. They worked on various activities with coins including Penny Grab, Coin Exchange and Mushroom Money to strengthen recognition skills. We continue to work on time by the hour with analog and digital clocks. The idea of counting by increments of 5 on an analog clock is beginning to make more sense. The students continue to work hard in their math process journals. They are listening for key words in the story problem in order to illustrate their work and write the number sentence.
Writing: The students continue to work on refining their uppercase letters and reviewing the lowercase letters we have learned so far. More students are beginning to use adjectives in their sentences. All students continue to refine sentence structure. Did 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 a given line? Lots to remember!!
Science: The students began their science unit, "Sunshine, Shadows and the Moon." We used the projector to create various shadows of people and objects. I posted the question--How are these shadows made? Do we need certain elements before we can have a shadow occur? I recorded the ideas the students had on the subject. All students agreed that we needed some kind of light source. One student commented that a body or some kind of object blocked the light. Some students noticed that we needed some kind on area in order 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. Wow--A shadow is really blocked light! Some students noticed that some shadows were were totally black, while others were gray or a light color. Why is that? Can light pass through an object? Stay tuned for more!!!
Technology: The students continue to use all the apps in reading and math that have been mentioned so far in small, individual and whole group settings. Stay tuned for some new apps related to science next week.
Literature: Dr. Seuss Books--"Cat in the Hat," "Cat in the Hat Comes Back," "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish," "Ten Apples Up on Top," "Fox in Socks,""Telling Time," "The Universe," "Children's Atlas of the Universe," "The Sun," "Shadows."
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