**Our SPACE STATION PROJECTS are complete!! SURPRISE!! Our movie detailing each teams journey is ready too. You all will get the first look. Scroll down to the end of this post for the reveal! The students will see it on Monday, but feel free to share it with them. I am enormously proud of all their hard work. Kudos to our tech adviser, Ms. Diehl, for helping us upload the movie. This project is a culmination of our Kindergarten year in the areas of social/emotional growth, reading, math, writing, social studies, science and technology, with elements of engineering, organization, the Eagle Essentials and most of all working with one another. Enjoy!!
**Thanks to Student Council (Go Gina and Reid!) for a very informative Earth Week. We read stories about water conservation, the rain forest, littering, recycling, wore green and yellow, studied about solar energy and read our Sunny Notes. Last Friday, we each planted a seed that will grow into a plant for our new Butterfly Gardens.
**The Academic Fair/Egg Drop Contest was awesome! A shout out to BEN for his project entitled, "What color were dinosaurs?" Great work and effort. Ben was able to talk about this project at the Academic Fair both in the day and in the evening. We were 7 for 7 in the Egg Drop contest. NO EGGS broke as they fell to the ground in their vehicles!! Thanks to our participants GINA, COLIN, BLAINE, PHILIPPE, EMILY, BEN, ETHAN and ALLY for their unique vehicle design!
**The Irving Book Fair was a success. A special thanks those students who purchased a book for our classroom---Ben for "U.S. Presidents," Anayla for "Llama, Llama and the Bully Goat," Samantha for "The Gingerbread Man," and "The Cool Friend," and to Ainsley from Ms. Collin's class for "Night Time Ninja." We will finish reading them next week.
**Irving Pacers are back!!!! It was a great Friday for a run/walk. Irving Pacers will continue until the end of the year. Don't forget to wear gym shoes/socks every Friday.
**The OPERA for the YOUNG presentation of "The Barber of Seville" is Tuesday, April 29th at 9:30 am in the gym. The students have been practicing some group singing parts. Should be fun.
** Tasty Dog Challenge is Wednesday, April 30th.
**Please read the information on Student Council's project of creating a Cook Book. The proceeds will benefit the Oak Park Food Pantry. Reps Ally and Colin are counting on you! Turn in your recipes by May 6th.
**Swap, Shop and Read is Thursday, May 8th from 6-8 pm. Bring those used books!
**POETRY ALERT! POETRY ALERT! Help your child practice his/her poem for the TRAVELING POETS PROJECT under the direction of Ms. Noonan. Watch for more
information regarding the Poetry Slam/Art Fest in next weeks Tuesday Packet. A super great event!
**District 97's Annual Ethnic Festival is Saturday, May 3rd with the parade beginning a 9:30 am. See the flyer in the Tuesday Packet for details. Irving School will have a float in it.
**Run With Me! Join the District 97 Fun Run on Saturday, May 10th at 8:00 am at Lindberg Park celebrating Fitness Week. Don't forget to fill out the form in your homework folder.
** We will begin our final science unit on PLANTS this coming week. On Wednesday, April 30th at 1:00 pm. gardener and Irving parent, Isabelle Henry will introduce the students to the worm composting process. We will have our "wormy" friends in our classroom so the students can really observe the wonder of worms and how they help the earth by creating more of it!
**Future Field Trip--Oak Park Conservatory--Tuesday, May 13th at 9:30 am. Permission slips will be out next week.
**Future Field Trip--Pizza and Play End of the Year Picnic at Rehm Park--Wednesday, May 28th from 9:30-noon at Rehm Park. Look for info soon. We need lots of help for this!
**Future Field Trip--Chicken Coop at the Gurgas Residence on Tuesday, June 3rd at 10:30 am. More info soon.
**Future Field Trip--Chef Ashley's Studio--Constructive Chaos in River Forest on Monday, June 9th at 12:30-2:00 pm. More info soon.
**Last Day of school is Tuesday, June 10th. It is a regular full day.
This week:
It was all about putting the finishing touches on space station projects and coming up with a name for them. Lots of work went into drawing, making, placing and staging items and materials in, on and around the space stations. Great use of conversation, negotiation, compromise and teamwork during this process. Their projects are truly out of this world!!! Our space stations will be in the classroom until the end of the school year. Feel free to come in before or after school to see them up close. They will be used for imaginative play, choice time and for a cozy space to read. Station day activities included creating star gazers, pattern block sponge print art and moon phase wheels.
Reading /Social Studies: The students completed Unit 8 Plants in our Treasures Reading series. This will serve as a nice introduction for our final science unit--"From Seed to Plant." The students reviewed all the vocabulary presented thus far. In our Haggerty Blue Book exercises, the students continue to work on blending, segmenting, adding and deleting sounds in 4-6 sound words orally and the students are now using their dry erase boards to record t heir changes. The students also continued to work on decoding words with the CVC, CCVC, and CVCC patterns, recognizing blends and digraphs and using pronouns and adjectives along with nouns and verbs in their sentence work. They continue to work on responding in writing to story elements, asking and answering questions about a given text and locating details in a given story that support those answers. Workstations this week included leveled readers with discussion/comprehension, writing about living things, diagramming a flower and writing about its parts, creating a garden map, long vowel review, using quotation marks activity, word building and using the app Magnetic ABC's to compose and write 3 sentences using their Writer's Checklist.
Math: The students completed activities that reviewed pattern block shapes and geometric solids. They discussed how many sides a given flat shape has and worked to create a new shape from 2 shapes using straws, sticks or blocks. The students continued their fun exploring geometric solids using marshmallows/clay and toothpicks/straws. The app Subitize Tree is now on the students iPads. The students had a great time working in pairs and taking the Subitize challenge. So fun. They continue to work on rote counting 1-130, listening to a story problem and illustrating and writing the number sentence for it, using the reckenreck to determine the number that when added will make 10 and refining written number forms. We will finish our first math journals and begin our new ones next week.
Writing: The students continue to work on sentence writing--making sure they begin with a capital letter, name and tell, add adjectives and end with a punctuation mark. We are also continuing to work on refining uppercase and lowercase forms.
Science: The students used their star gazers. It was cool for them to see the "stars" inside of their tube. We talked about the moon phases and the fact that we are really seeing different amounts of light being reflected on the moon. How much light we see depends on the positions of the Earth, sun and moon. They will make their final reflections in their science journal next week. Next week, we will begin prep on our final science unit--seeds.
Technology: The kindergarten iPads received a bit of updating. Some apps were added to them. We worked on the videotaping process for our iMovie. The students assisted on some of the stills. I hoped to capture the essence of the student's actions and interactions as well as conversation related to their space stations. I will say for me that editing was a challenge! I wanted to include everything!!! In the area of reading, student small groups and individuals used the apps LexiaCore 5, Magnetic ABC's, Sentence Reading Magic and Phonics/Vowels. In the area of math, students small groups and individuals used the apps Subitize Tree, 10 Frame Fill, Geoboard and Math Bug.
In science we continue to keep track of the weather via the app weatherunderground and check in with NASA and Moon Globe. The students continue to enjoy setting their sight words on "fire" using Fire Finger.
Literature: "Phases of the Moon," "Don't Be a Litterbug," "What is Happening to Our Rain Forests?" "What is Global Warming?" "The Moon" (poetry) "Magic School Bus-Get's Recycled," "Let's Be Water Wise," "Watch Over Water," "Grow, Tree, Go," "The Grand Old Tree," "U. S. Presidents," (Thanks, Ben!) "Night Time Ninja," (Thanks, Ainsley.)
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