**The students returned well rested and eager to begin the week. The weather is slowly warming up. The students are using their daily stretching and yoga poses to get in shape for Friday PACERS running club which will resume soon.
**Our Spelling Bee Reps, ALLY and EMILY along with our alternate, REID are studying for the K-2 Spelling Bee that will be held this Wednesday, April 9th at 11:25 am. in the Irving Auditorium. We will be there to cheer them on. Stop in if you like. Relax and have fun is our mantra! It will be exciting.
**Our FIELD TRIP to the Adler Planetarium in this Thursday, April 10th. We will be boarding the bus at 9:00 am and return to school by 2:00 pm. Thanks so much for the overwhelming response to volunteer. Unfortunately, I can only take 4 chaperones. For this trip, B. Ahring, L. Wojcik, K. Mason and J. Flannery will assist. We have 4 trips left plus our End of the Year Family Picnic so we will need many more volunteers! Parent volunteers will carpool courtesy of B. Ahring. ALL STUDENTS need a BAG LUNCH (peanut/tree nut free,) GYM SHOES, SOCKS and dress for the weather. We are hoping for an outside picnic! Keep your fingers crossed!! We will be seeing an Imax movie called, "One World, Once Sky" at 10:15 am. From there, the groups will see Our Solar System, Shoot for the Moon, and Planet Explorers exhibit rooms. Planet Explorers is an interactive exhibit that allows only 2 classrooms at a time for a 30 minute period. We will eat our lunch and then go to that exhibit with Ms. Weigel's class. It is going to be a great time!
**Sign up for the Egg Drop and Academic Fair continues! Ms. Creehan spoke to the class about each event and show examples of academic fair projects. Don't forget to sign up on line for one or the other or both. Let me know if I can help in any way. The Egg Drop Contest and Academic Fair are Wednesday, April 23rd.
**Thanks for all the great boxes and cool stuff. We will begin our prep for Space Station design and construction this week. Because of our field trip and Good Friday off, we will work the next 2 weeks on the project.
**Future event--Opera for the Young presents "The Barber of Seville." Ms. Hiokski has begun prep for this interactive event that will take place on Tuesday, April 29th.
**In Friendship Club this week, Ms. Bell Bey did a lesson on being a "social detective." The students explored different social situations and roll played appropriate ways to deal with them.
**In Mr. Packer Math Enrichment this week, Mr. Packer shared with the students their student completed EST Book with each student's writing and illustrations.
This week:
It was all about planets, beginning to write about our paragraphs about our shadow pose. and tubers sprouting! The students learned a song about the order of the planets and some interesting facts about each one. Which ones are land planets? Which are gas planets? We accessed information on our iPads about NASA'S space station daily report. Students are particularly interested in new and dwarf planets and moons that the other planets have. In writing, the students started to learn what a paragraph is and how to write one. They are working on their draft ideas. Our tubers are both sprouting! We have some very healthy root systems and shoots growing out of the eyes! Stay tuned. Our station day activities this week included clock clocks, name rockets-addition project, ranking the planets in order and pattern block rockets.
Reading/Social Studies: The students began Unit 8 Plants this week in our Treasures Reading series. They began by building background knowledge around how a tree grows. The students talked about Oak Park and how many trees they see daily. Our class took a walk outside with our Tree Finder Book to see if there were oak trees in the area and what other types of trees were in our school neighborhood. They located maple, ginko and ash trees. The students understood that a tree is a plant that takes many years to grow. They also understood that a tree grows from a seed. Students listened to the Big Book story, "Oak Trees." They noted that the book was non fiction or informational. The students responded to the literature expressing that they had seen acorn (the seed) and some students even collected them. Our sight words for the week are little and said. The students reviewed these words along with all of our other sight words. The students noted that the word said does not sound how it looks. Our target sounds for the week are short u and ck. We reread the big book story and the students took turns using the retelling cards to retell the story in their own words. The students used their elkonin boxes to segment and blend 4,5, and 6 phoneme words. The students read the decodable story, paper story, "A Little Acorn." They made predictions about story content and orally answered questions about the story. The students took turns reading to a partner and filling out the Reader's Checklist. They used the story element guide to ask and answer Who, What, Where, When and Why questions about the story. Our Robust Vocabulary included PLANT, GROW, CONCEITED, EQUAL, CHARMING. Our oral vocabulary story, "The Conceited Apple Branch," gave us a healthy new respect for dandelions. The students listened to the poem, "Acorns." They discussed what they thought the author's message was and noted the rhyming pattern. We had a discussion about the quotation marks used in our decodable story. They tell that someone is speaking. The word said, like speech bubbles, tell that some is speaking too. Workstations this week included save the trees posters, short u sentences, sentences riddles, CVC sentence making, leveled reader oral fluency and comprehension checks and discussion, classifying long and short vowels, opinion piece: Why do we need trees? tree fact paper and Montessori Crossword iPad exercise on short u, ck and long e words.
Math: The student continue to work on counting beyond 100 and writing 2 and 3 digit numbers. They are continuing to work on listening to a story problem, illustrating the process and writing the number sentence for it. We are working with numbers 1-10. Students continue to work on telling time by the hour. The students had a great time this week using the app Subitize Tree to work on memory and retention of numbers. Working on pattern block rockets gave them a chance to work on visual perception skills and problem solving.
Writing: The students continue to work on refining their upper and lowercase letter forms. We are almost finished with lowercase letter formation. The discussion this week centered around the question, "What is a paragraph?" The student learned that a paragraph is multiple sentences about one topic that flow together and have an introduction, middle and ending. The students used their shadow pose pictures as the topic for their paragraph and generated ideas about what they could write about. They are in the process of writing a draft and using a question format to guide them in organizing their ideas. Their draft will be a place where they can make any changes or corrections before they write their final copy. Stay tuned!
Science: The students continue to study shadows, the planets and the sun. In did an experiment where they placed plastic wrap, a book, a cup of water and wax paper on the overhead to create a shadow. They each created a graph answering yes or no to seeing if a shadow is produced. The students discovered they can produce light shadows and dark shadows or no shadow at all. They also found out that it depends how much light is allowed to pass through the object. We used some scientific words! Shadows can opaque--they do not allow light to pass through, so they produce a dark shadow or translucent--some light does pass through but produces a light shadow. The students enjoyed trying out other objects in their choice time. They reflected their thoughts in their science journal.
Technology: In reading and math this week, no new apps have been introduced. Student small groups continue to use all previously mentioned apps that enhance and reinforce blending, segmenting, vocabulary recognition, phonics, reading, and reading fluency recordings, addition, subtraction, counting, place value, writing numbers, problem solving, subitizing, number order and more or less concepts. In science, the students explored the app NASA to view pictures of space and spacecraft and get daily news from the international Space Station.
Literature: "Mercury," "Venus," "Earth," "Mars," "Jupiter," "My Place in Space," "Frog in Space," "Children's Atlas of the World," "1000 Facts About Space," "The Sun is My Favorite Star," "The Planets," "Can You See My Shadow?"
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