**It has been a very busy week! The students were busy tracking the germination time of their seeds. Most sprouting time was within 4 days. (sunflower, morning glory, marigold) Emily's seeds (nasturtium) took 9 days to germinate. The student's are becoming plant nurturers! All week they tracked the growth of their baby plants. The baby plants are now at home with your child. Happy Mother's Day! They will continue to take care of their plant at home. See the tips in your child's homework folder.
**The beginning of our ABC Countdown was a smash. Check out our own Astronauts--Colin and Ben. The Dance party was awesome! Check out the kid conga line! We will continue our Countdown this week beginning with F for Friendship Day and continuing Friday with J "Jump for Jalen" Day. Check your calendar of events! The students are planning each week...sooooo you will know when I know!
**Our Field Trip to the Oak Park Conservatory is Tuesday, May 13th. Cross your fingers for no rain when we are walking. I have B. Barnett and J. Smyth as our volunteers. Feel free to join us if you like. Our feet will be leaving school around 9:00 am and returning by 11:30 am. I still am missing permission slips from 4 students. Please send them ASAP! Thanks!
**The TRAVELING POETS Project begins on Tuesday. Does your child know his/her poem? They have been doing well during school practice. They will travel this Tuesday and next Tuesday to other classrooms providing a "Poetry Break."
**ART FEST/POETRY SLAM is this Thursday, May 15th. The Fest begins at 6:30 pm. The Poetry Slam begins at 6:45 pm in the Auditorium. Our class has 3 Kdg Slammers participating! There is still time if you want slam, just fill out the form enclosed in your child's homework folder. Remember--you can recite solo, with a partner, parent, group, say your traveling poets poem, write your own, rap it, sing it. It will be great time. The Fest features art from every child in the school, the chorus performing and Mexican dances and songs from Senoritas Zaragoza and Munoz.
**Swap, Shop and Read was a success. Thanks to those who attended. There were many good books to be had by all. The milk and cookies were good too!
**Route to Reading has concluded for the year. I am still in the process of testing the students in my rotation. If you have not received your child's final mastery notification, you will this week.
**The FUN RUN was absolutely FUN! A HUGE shout out to ETHAN and JALEN who ran with me. They were fast!
**Family Math "Monopoly Math" Night is Thursday, May 22nd from 6:30-8:00 pm. Sign up information was sent home in the Tuesday Packet.
**All School Olympic Day is Friday, May 23rd. We will perform our Olympic feats from 8:30 to 11:00 am. Stop by and see us!
**Permission slips and information on our remaining 3 field trips will be out this week.
**Final Assessments for the end of the year report card will begin next week. DIBELS, Common Core Math, San Diego Quick, Writing and English Language Arts will be given. Report Cards/Summer Packets will go home on Tuesday, June 10th--the last day of school.
**Last Day of School events--Please join us for our Family Hour on Tuesday, June 10th from 2:00-2:55 pm. We will sign autographs, have refreshments, get our report cards/summer packets and read a closing story. All are welcome!!
**In Friendship Club this week, Ms. Bell Bey is winding down her time with our class. The students got to vote like a "real" registered voter on what they wanted to do for the last class.
**In Mr. Packer Math Enrichment this week, Mr. Packer continued his lesson on creating a pictures using shapes.
This week:
It was all about our sprouting seeds and baby plants. The students came back to a great discovery last Monday. Most of their seeds had germinated. (sunflower, marigold, morning glory) The nasturtium seeds took about 9 days. Students carefully checked their plant each day and observed the shoots growing, turning into a stem and leaves forming. We also planted seeds in our in class garden. We have a wide variety including seeds brought in by the students. (orange, green pepper, some sort of pod seed, grape and strawberry) They will observe on Monday to see if any germinating has taken place. We have started to chat about our outside garden bed. The students took a look at it. It is mainly weeds right now, but we will clear it shortly. The students are loving observing our "wormy" compost. The magnifying window lets them view the worms at work. Cool! "Red Bear" Table is in charge of bringing in "food" to feed our compost on Wednesday. Station Day activities included Creepy Crawly addition stories/illustrating and writing the number sentence, sequencing seed to plant activity, parts of a flower diagram and Lego Challenge activities from Philippe's book.
Reading/Social Studies: The students are continuing to work on skills and literature from Units 9 and 10 of the Treasures Reading series. Sight words this week are look and has. Target sounds this week are Jj and Yy. Students spent time with partners using their word cards, picture cards and punctuation cards to create sentences. Students continue to work on recognizing and using nouns, verbs and adjectives and pronouns. Each day this week, students worked on group substitution activities to strengthen sound recognition and automatic recoding of phonemes to create words. The students read their decodable and leveled readers independently and worked on story elements, sequencing events and then came together into small groups to discuss key details and vocabulary. Workstations this week included leveled readers reading for meaning and fluency, word building, responding in writing to what you have read and retelling key details, asking and answering question about unknown words in a text, being able to recognize different types of texts and finding details in informational reading and clarifying the meaning of multiple meaning words.
Math: The students continue to work on reading a story problem, illustrate the process and writing the number sentence in their math journal. They continue to work on recognizing the relationship between numbers in a number bond. The use of concrete objects continues to be helpful to some students fingers, blocks, drawings, tally marks and number lines are part of that process. The students continue to review counting by 1's, 5's and 10's, counting on from a random number, rote counting from 1-130, writing 2 and 3 digit numbers, telling how many ten frames are needed to make a number (place value) and recognizing, and using pattern blocks and geometric solids and telling if a number is more or less than another.
Writing: The students began prep work on their final writing project, a primary paragraph on the topic: Worms. They created a list of what they know about worms. They asked and answered questions about worm facts. From this information, they will write their paragraph. Next week, the students will also reflect in writing about the wonderful volunteers and teachers that have worked in our classroom. They will reflect on Reading Grandma Mary, Mrs. D and Ms. Jack, who will be retiring at the end of this school year. The students will share their thoughts with these wonderful people.
Science: The students continued their study of seeds. This week they observed the inside of a seed. We soaked pinto beans and pea seeds overnight in water. Each student was given a set of each seed--one that was soaked and one that was not. Students observed that the soaked seeds were bigger! Yes--the water climbed into the spaces of the seed!! With some assistance, the students split the soaked seed in half. They observed the outer covering (coat) and in the inside corner was the tiny baby plant. (embryo) The rest of the inside is the see food where the seed gets its nourishment. The students made a diagram in their science journals labeling the parts of a seed. The students made sketches of their particular baby plant and noted the leaf structure and shape in their sketch. Next week--hydroponics--sprouting seed with no soil. Stay tuned.
Technology: The students continue to experiment with apps introduced last week and added the apps Tic Tac Toe and Life Cycles.
Literature: "Earl the Earthworm Digs for His Life," "Compost Stew," ""Hey Little Ant," "The Curious Garden," "I Am A Seed," "The Tiny Seed," "Plants," "Ants Day Off," "Tools for a Garden,"
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