Friday, March 21, 2014

UPDATES for 3/17-3/21 2014

**Congratulations to our Spelling Bee reps--Emily and Ally!!!!  Reid will serve as our alternate.  These students will participate in the Irving School Annual Spelling Bee for K-2 to be held Wednesday, April 9th at lunchtime.  Twelve of our classmates took part in the classroom bee.  It was a great show of interest, effort and courage!  All students are to be commended for their great sportsmanship and support of others!
**Spring Break begins 3/22-3/30.  Classes resumes on Monday, March 31st.  All students traveling near and far have their travel journals.  Other students have requested a journal for home use.  I can't wait to read about their adventures!
**Report Cards are in your child's homework folder along with a Lexia Core5 update and information for on line registration for the Academic Fair and Egg Drop Contest.  I would love to see our class represented by some projects and egg vehicles.  Ms. Creehan will come in after break to show the students some past projects and answer any questions they have.  The on line registration also gives detailed info on project set up.   The Academic Fair is Wednesday, April 23rd in the gym.  Students will have speak about their projects to Irving students during the day and again at night for the public and families from 6:30-7:30 pm.  The Egg Drop Contest will also be held on Wednesday, April 23rd beginning at 12:30 out on the playground.  
**Keep sending in field trip permission slips and money for our Adler Planetarium Trip. 
**Route to Reading Rotation 6 has concluded.  You should have received notification of your child's skill mastery.  Route to Reading Rotation 7 will begin on Tuesday, April 1st.
**Everyone smiled brightly for their individual Spring Picture.  A test pic will be sent home sometime in April with instruction for purchase.
**No Friendship Club this week.  Ms. Bell Bey had a meeting.
**In Mr. Packer Math Enrichment, Mr. Packer continued his activities on superlatives.
**YES!!   It's finally time!!!  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.  Our space station prep, design, construction and detailing will take place the week of April 21st-25th.  We may need some hot glue volunteers during the detailing process.  Stay tuned!
**Please have a safe and restful spring break.  It is somewhat of a homework holiday-----but-----you can read your Busy Reader, work on your project idea/vehicle idea for Academic Fair/Egg Drop, write and illustrate in your travel journal, log onto Lexia, XtraMath, Spelling City or BrainPop,  play some of your games and do Word Play,  get outside and exercise, do some yoga poses, observe nature and spend some time with family and friends.
This week:
It was all about Art Start Part 3--Welcoming Spring, Super Tuber and School Spirit Week Activities.
In Art Start, Ms. Kris read the story, "The Reasons for Seasons."  She talked about how we have seasons and in particular the upcoming season of Spring.  She also brought a book on mythology and talked to the students about myths--stories that were told to explain a happening.....no science involved.  She read a story based on Greek mythology on how spring came to be.  For our cooking session, the students created "flower" cupcakes and flower sugar cookies.  They used brightly colored sprinkles for decorations.  Pretty cool!  On to Super Tuber----Students brought in their potatoes.  We went over a little history of the potato using maps and pictures.   The students learned that the potato is a tuber and the tuber grows into more potatoes.  We talked about why Ireland is known for potatoes.   The students used their magnifiers to look for the "eyes."  They measured the length with cubes and weighed their potatoes using a scale and teddy bear counters.   The students also graphed how they liked to eat potatoes.  French Fried won out followed by mashed.  I showed the students how to grow a potato plant using a potato and suspending it in water with toothpicks and placing it in a sunny window.  Stay tuned!  Emily's mom spoke to us about Ireland and brought some great Irish music and a special drum that was played using a small stick moved back and forth.  All the students got to try it.   School Spirit Week was great!  Lots of smiles---wearing of green----lots of mini Mr. Wyza's, a mini nurse Jamie and mini Ms. Gullo and even a Ms. Weigel!  Story book and movie characters were everywhere.  Lots of princesses, super heroes, dragons, monsters, an Ariel and t.v. characters.  It was a great week!  Station day activities included writing about the sun, building animals with cubes (tricky!) and creating number sentence and illustrating the process.
Reading/Social Studies:    We took a break from our Treasures Reading Series.  We will begin Unit 8 Plants after spring break.  The students reviewed all their sight words.   The students worked on some Common Core standards--writing an opinion about a book, asking and answering questions about a fiction story and after reading a particular story, illustrating the front and back cover and title page.  The students used previous stories and worked with partners to discuss and record the title, setting, characters and the plot.  They used their story elements butterfly for this.   The students listened to the story, "My five Senses."  They listened for key details and orally sequenced events in the story.  We continue to use the Haggerty Blue Book exercises for isolating vowels, blending and segmenting, adding and deleting and substituting phonemes.    The students continue to review blends and digraphs. They are using their elkonin boxes to segment 4, 5, and 6 letter words.  The students worked on a variety of games and movement activities with the focus on spelling their sight vocabulary. 
Math:    The students worked this week on illustrating and writing number sentences for story problems.  Figuring out what process to use is becoming clearer.  Students are sharper at recognizing even and odd numbers.  They continue to work on counting on from a random number, counting quantities to 30, telling time by the hour and comparing 2 written numbers between 1 and 20.  The students are also working on place value by putting together and taking apart teen numbers from 11-19 by naming how many tens and how many ones.
Writing:    The students have been doing more writing this week.   They wrote an opinion piece about a favorite story and wrote an information piece about the sun.  They took some time to write in their journals about their lucky day.  Students continue to work on sentence structure including capital letter at the beginning and punctuation at the end.  They are beginning to be more consistent about reading or proofing their writing piece before they come to journal conference.  Inventive spelling remains very acceptable.  Students are working at composing and writing 1-4 sentences on a given topic independently.
Science:    The students continue their study of shadows and the sun and space.  The students reviewed what makes a shadow.  They created their shadows as well as observed the shadows of their classmates during our sunny weather at lunch.  They observed that a bigger shadow will "hide" the smaller one.  They reflected in their science journal their ideas on which way a shadow will fall in relation to its light source.  I took picture of each students action shadow.  They will be using these for their beginning paragraph project.  The students listened to informational stories about the sun.  Many knew that the sun is a star and is made up of burning hot gases.  It is the star that is closest to us on Earth.   Some student were surprised to hear that the sun is just medium star.  They wrote a fact piece to go along with their sun collages.  We began learning a song about the order of the planets and looked up general facts via the internet and books on the first four land planets.  The students are also learning that space is always changing and that scientists are discovering new planets and learning things about planets near to our Earth like Mars all the time.  Our shadow silhouettes and photos are up in the hall.  Can you guess the shadow that goes with the silhouette?
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, Dolch Words, Write Words and Sight Words 100 were used this week.  The students set their written words on fire with the free app Fire Finger! (thanks, Ms. Parkinson!)  We are having great fun with it.  In  math, the students continue their work on addition and subtraction processes with the apps Mathland, Butterfly Math, Find the Sums, Top-It Addition and Kids Math.  The app Math Rack was used with the whole group for counting and grouping.  In science, the apps NASA, weatherunderground, Solar System are assisting students in the questions they have.
Literature:    "My Five Senses," "There is No Place Like Space," "The Sun is My Favorite Star," "Sun," "The Sun," "Day and Night," "The Reasons for Seasons," "Amazing Sun," "I Can See My Shadow."

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