**Please send a potato of your choice to school on Monday, March 17th for our Super Tuber Activity. Do not cook it! We will learn its history, examine it closely, perform some graphing exercises, measure it and look for its "eyes," take a look at the different varieties and learn about its connections to Ireland. We will also choose one to grow. Thanks to G. Shelton, J. Smyth and H. Lim for helping us out! It's our class salute to St. Patrick's Day.
**Please join our Kindergarten classes on Friday, March 14th from 1:30-2:30 pm for Bagpiper Patrick Lynch. He will visit our class and speak about the history of the instrument, take it apart and show its pieces and play some spectacular music. Siblings welcome!
**Please keep sending snow pants and boots. Hopefully--this will be the last week. Could spring actually be in the air??!!
**Our Green Team rep, Gina did a fantastic job along with other Green Team members in presenting at the PTO Meeting on Thursday. Ms. Parkinson spoke about the mission of green Team and members read a poem and showed a video they made on recycle, re-use and renew. We saw Gina and Reid in the video. Well done!
**Our new Student Council reps--Ally and Colin attended their first meeting of the new trimester. They are working to plan the activities for Spirit Week which is the week before spring break.
**We are now in our final trimester of the school year! Report cards will go home on Friday, March 21st. This year has really flown by!
**Route to Reading Rotation 6 will resume next week. It was on hiatus due to staff assisting with the upper grade ISAT testing.
**Spring Pictures will be taken on Monday, March 17th probably first thing in the morning. This is an individual posed picture with a background.
**Look for information on our field trip to Adler Planetarium (Thursday, April 10th) at the end of the week.
**Also at the end of the week, look for information on Irving's Annual Spelling Bee which will be held on Wednesday, April 9th at lunch time. Each classroom is asked to give a "classroom bee" resulting in the top 2 spellers and an alternate attending the K-2 Spelling Bee to represent our class.
**Future event--All School Academic Fair and Egg Drop Contest--Wednesday, April 23rd. Do you have something ou are really interested in? Can you make a project out of it? Can you construct a vehicle that will keep an egg from breaking when dropped from a third floor window? Think about it!!!!
**School is closed for Spring Break from 3/22-3/30. School resumes on Monday, March 31st.
**In Friendship Club this week, Ms. Bell Bey continued her lessons on the zones of self regulation and strategies for moving from one zone to another.
**In Mr. Packer Math Enrichment this week, Mr. Packer completed his lesson on ways to show different number groupings thru illustration.
**We continue getting closer to collection of GIANT BOXES and other cool things for our upcoming space station projects. You can bring them in after spring break!
This week:
It was all about Art Start and the beginning of our new science unit, "Sunshine, Shadows, the Moon and Space." Let's start with Art Start. In our second lesson of combining literature and cooking, Chef Ashley brought her mom, Ms. Kris to read the Jan Brett story, "The Mitten." The students talked about winter and winter clothing. The students made connections about winter in their own lives. Ms. Kris talked with students about things they could do to be warm when they came in from the cold. Making hot chocolate was mentioned. Chef Ashley chimed in and spoke about the activity of making their own hot chocolate mix. Back at their tables, the student learned about measuring by the cup and half cup and their filled their container with milk crystals, cocoa powder, powdered sugar and marshmallows. Students used their senses to feel the milk crystals, smell the cocoa and see the layering of ingredients. Cool! Next the students made "snowflakes" using pretzels and melted chocolate and colorful sprinkles. Lots of fun!
The students began their science inquiry on "What makes a shadow?" and the beginning of our Space cross curricular theme. We are slowly transforming our class into a space workshop. We began with an inquiry discussion about what they know about space. What is in it? How was the earth and other planets form? What is a universe? Wow! Lots of thinking going on! Station Day activities included Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss masks, counting number addition completion, Dr. Seuss word search, solving the pattern block puzzles and name the picture with word families en and ot.
Reading/Social Studies: The students continue working in 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 pictures. After reading the story, the students discussed what the main idea was. They made connections in the story about activities they do in their backyards at different times of the year. They noted certain details in the story. The sight words and and what were introduced. The students continued work with target sounds Bb and Ll. They did an activity where they listened for the targeted sound and told if it was at the beginning or ending of a word. Students reviewed the function of nouns, action words-verbs and what an adjective is and how to use it in a sentence and when speaking. As we have been doing all year, the students worked on the exercises in our Haggerty Blue Book. This oral exercise book contains activities for blending, segmenting, adding, deleting and substituting phonemes to create a new word or reveal a word family. The students continue to work on the Common Core Standards in language arts. Students express not only verbally, but also in writing their opinion, story elements and asking and answering questions about a story read. They have come so far! Workstations for this week included Leveled reader fluency and comprehension check/discussion, story elements butterfly on the story of their choice, partner read aloud with reader's checklist, contributing to a seasons action and picture chart, finding the sentence that goes with the picture, writing a question from a story read and answering that question, word play activities using addition and deletion skills for creating words and using partner and small group board games and iPad activities to enhance vocabulary development.
Math: The students revisited pattern block shapes and worked at constructing puzzles of various complexity---puzzles with shape outlines and puzzles without. It was interesting to observe the types of strategies the students used---starting with the biggest piece first, starting with edges first, starting with the middle first, using two blocks to create the shape (instead of a hexagon, using 2 trapezoids) Cool! Very fun visual perception and figure ground work! The students are enjoying their work using the rekenreck. They played, "What's my number?" "How far is it from ten," and "Show me." In their math journals, the students are working both on addition and now take away or subtraction using pictures and counters. Some students are forming mental images in their head and some are using the counting on strategy to solve adding problems. We are getting a lot more practice on number writing. Math workstations this week included writing 2 and 3 digit numbers, teen ten frame review, counting on to add activity, pattern block puzzles and rekenreck and iPad activities relating to number quantities, attributes, shapes, number bonds to 10 and adding and taking away.
Writing: The students continued to work on the lowercase letters introduced thus far. They applied what they learned in their orange practice book. All students continue to work on refining their sentence structure. They are using their writer's checklist, re reading their work before they come to journal conference. We continue to use the stars and wishes model where students critique their peers writing. With the addition of encouraging more adjective use to expand their sentences, the students sentences are beginning to become more descriptive. Students are also continue to work on sequencing events in their daily journal entries. Many students are using key words--first, next, then and last in their writing. Their Weather Project will give them more opportunities to show what they know about how to write a sentence or sentences!
Science: The students began their science unit, "Sunshine, Shadows, the Moon and Space." 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 have a shadow occur? I recorded the ideas that students had on the subject. All students agreed we needed some kind of light source. Some students commented that a body or some kind of object blocked the light source. Other students noticed that we needed a place to see the shadow. The "recipe" for the creating a shadow became light source, something to block the light source and a surface to see the shadow on. Wow! commented Reid--"a shadow is blocked light." Students observed other things about shadows--some are really dark (totally black,) while others are were gray or light colored or you could hardly see them. Why is that? Can light pass through an object? Stay tuned for more!
Technology: In reading small group and individual instruction, the apps Montessori Crossword, Magic Reading 2 and iTalk were used to enhance sound blending skills, review sue of consonant blends and digraphs and plurals and emphasize work with word families and particular letter sounds. Students listened to their own reading via iTalk and critique themselves using the Reader's Checklist. In math small group and individual instruction students worked on the apps Geoboard, Math Bug, Top-It Addition, Number Find and Monster Squeeze. Whole group instruction continues to center around the use of the apps The Rack and Number Line for counting, and cardinality as well as addition and subtraction work. BrainPop, weatherunderground and weather.com and PBS Kids were used this week in connection with our science unit.
Literature: "The Cat in the Hat" "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back," "Fox in Socks," "The Eyes Book," "The Universe," "What is a Shadow," "The Mitten," "Children's Atlas of the Universe," "Weather," "When Will It Be Spring," "A Story, A Story."
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