Sunday, April 13, 2014

UPDATES for 4/7-4/11 2014

**What a great week!  Spring weather is finally here! (I hope!)  Space station construction began.   The K-2 Spelling Bee was fantastic!   Chef Ashley had her final session with students for some literature and food art.  Our field trip to Adler Planetarium was great.  The students listened to a cool program provided by Hatch School's Steel Drum Band under the direction of Evan and Paul Jacobson.  Wow!
**There is still time to create an Egg Drop vehicle or Academic Fair project!!  Sign up on line via the flyer enclosed in your child's homework folder.  The Egg Drop and Academic Fair is Wednesday, April 23rd!!  Come on.....It will be fun!!
**A BIG CONGRATULATIONS to our Spelling Bee participants, ALLY and EMILY for their participation in the Spelling Bee.  They were fabulous!  Great poise and control.  A SHOUT OUT also to REID who was our alternate.
**Our field trip to the PLANETARIUM was very fine.  The students saw the movie, "One World, One Sky."  They visited exhibits about space travel, the planets, the moon and saw some cool experiments about air pressure and block holes.  They thoroughly enjoyed the interactive Planet Explorers exhibit dressing up like astronauts, blasting off, walking in space, seeing a space toilet, food and beds, building, crawling under space tunnels and driving the lunar rover and seeing space rocks.  The weather did cooperate and we were able to picnic outside.  The students will be reflecting on their experiences in writing for homework.  Thanks to B. Ahring, L. Wojcik, K. Mason, J. Flannery and H. Lim for their help on this trip.  We all had a very productive  and fun day.
**Route to Reading Rotation 6 will conclude next week.  You will receive notification of your child's skill mastery.
**BRING IN YOUR COINS!!  This year, in conjunction with the Book Fair, the students will participate in Scholastic's All for the Books program.  Money raised will be added to the library funds to purchase books for our Irving Library and we will be also donating used books to the Parenthesis Family Center--a local organization that aids families with young children.  We already have our coin bucket and will be ready for donations of coins beginning on Monday, April 14th thru April 17th. 
**REID and GINA and the GREEN TEAM participants are working some cool things for EARTH WEEK. (4/21-4/25)  Look for a flyer of events in next week's Tuesday Packet.
**OPERA for the YOUNG'S presentation of the "Barber of Seville" is Tuesday, April 29th.  Ms. Hiolski has been working with the students on some interactive singing parts!  Families and siblings welcome.  I am not sure of the time so stay tuned!
**In Friendship Club this week, Ms. Bell Bey continued to work with students on being a "social detective.  She is reading from a marvelous book called, "Being a Social Detective."  The students are taking a look a behavior that is "expected" in social situations.
**No math with Mr. Packer this week.  We were watching the Steel Drum Band form Hatch.
This week:
It was about many things this week.  I spoke about our field trip already.  Our final session with Chef Ashley centered around the artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, an Italian portrait painter best know for his creating imaginative portraits made entirely of vegetables, fruits, flowers, fish or books.  The students looked at some of his portraits and then used the "food" Chef Ashley provided to create a portrait of their own.  They used 2 kinds of noodles, oatmeal, lentils, 4 types of beans, bay leaves, corn seeds and rice.  They turned out totally cool!  The students will be bringing them home on Monday.  We are working on arrangements to take a field to Chef Ashley's studio called "Constructive Chaos" in June.  Stay tuned for details.   This program was made available to students thru District 97's Oak Park Education Foundations Art Start.  Kudos to Chef Ashley and her mom, Ms. Kris for their work!  Space station work has begun.  Each group has 5 or 6 participants.  They then elected a project manager.  Our field trip fueled more passion about construction.  The student are using social, analytical, scientific and behavioral skills that they have embraced throughout the year.  It is truly teamwork with a capital T!  The students really did use their prior knowledge and new ideas about space and space station design.  With their team, they discussed and sketched out some drawings or "prototypes" of what their space station might look like.  Prior to all this, the class talked about the word  "compromise" and what it means.  Our room was filled with boxes.  Each team received 3 giant boxes.  They then decided as a team what other boxes they might need from the middle of the room.  They made pencil lines where they wanted me to cut and placed the boxes in a places their team all agreed on.  I cut and taped with"gorilla tape."  The students crawled in to try them out to see if any other cutting/taping was needed.  On Monday afternoon, we will begin the painting process.  We are keeping track of progress by making a video which we will add to this blog when everything is complete.   Station Day activities included creating 3D constellations with marshmallows and tooth picks, addition story problems--read, show your word, write the number sentence, creating a 2D constellation and naming it. 
Reading/Social Studies:    The students continue to work on Unit 8 Plants in our Treasures Reading series.  They talked about and read about seeds and plants.  They accessed prior knowledge from our earlier fall unit on apples.  The students revisited our apple seed tray.  They made connections in their own lives of blowing dandelion seeds everywhere or helping their parents in backyard gardens planting different types of seeds.  The students listened to the Big Book story, "Seed Secrets."  The story contained ways that seeds travel.  The students observed the pictures and tracked the print as I read.  They were able to verbally ask and answer questions about the text.  Our target words for this week are here and was.  The students used these and all of their other words along with pictures to create sentences with a partner.  Our target sound continues to be short u.  We continue to revisit adjectives and how to use them to enhance the way we speak and write.  The students took turns recalling events in the story and created a recall list of how seeds travel.  In additional vocabulary development, the students worked on position words.  The students worked with their white boards on exercises involving adding, deleting and substituting sounds.  We revisited blends and digraphs in the initial and final position in words.  The students read the decodable story, "The Bud is Up."  They made predictions about story content.  They also made a note about the sequential order in planting a seed.  They reread the story to a partner to practice fluency.  Our Robust Vocabulary this week included GRADUALLY, SEEDS, OBSERVE.  Workstations this week included leveled reader discussions and fluency checks, writing about seeds and plants, playing the game--"Super Sweet Parts of Speech," (noun, verb, adjective sort) building word family words--at, op, ug et, drawing and writing about vegetables, mixed up sentences solving, writing about people who have jobs with plants and playing, "What's my Ending Mark?"
Math:    The students continue to work in their math process journals.  They continue to work on reading the story problem, figuring out the process, illustrating their work and writing a number sentence.  They reviewed time by the hour using analog and digital clocks.  The students are enjoying searching for numbers 0-100 in the activity called "Number Hunt."  The students continue to work with shapes experimenting with combining certain shapes to make a new shape.  What happens when you combine 2 trapezoids?  This week the students experimented with 3 dimensional shapes structure and beginning engineering! (who knew!)  How do you construct a 3D shapes that will  remain standing?  You need a strong supportive base!  It was really awesome to see the students figuring out how to get their structure to not fall over.  Lots of brain work going on here!  The students continue to work on refining number forms with practice writing of 2 and 3 digit numbers.
Writing:     The students continue to work on their Shadow Pose paragraphs.  Most students are working to finish their drafts.  They are learning the importance of reading or proofing their own writing and making their own corrections.
Science:    The students continue the study of shadows.  We have 2 more experiments to complete outside and will move on to study of the moon next week.  This week the students learned about constellations.  We accessed information on our iPads about star patterns in the sky.  The students are very interested in how constellations are formed and named.  We read several books on Greek and Roman mythology and found out some of the stories and names behind the constellations.  The students were totally fascinated by it!  The students created and named their own constellation.  They are displayed on out door.
Technology:    The students looked at creating a video and how to position the iPad so your movie will not "jump" around.  It does take some practice.  No new apps were introduced this week.
Literature:     "Zoo in the Sky," "Once Upon a Starry Night," "Seeing Stars," "Sun, Moon and Stars," "Stars and Planets," "Stories in the Stars," "Stars, Stars, Stars," "Cosmic Light Shows," "Un lazo a la luna," "Dwarf Planet Pluto," "The Asteroid Belt," "Meteors and Comets."




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