**NO MORE BOOTS!! (I hope!) Spring is in the air!!! I spotted snowdrops in my neighborhood!!
**SPRING PICTURES will be taken Monday, March 16th at 8:50 am. Don't forget--if you having siblings pictures taken you need to have the form filled out.
**Bag Piper, Patrick Lynch will visit our class on Monday, March 16th at 2:00 pm to share and speak about the instrument--the bag pipe. Parents and siblings are welcome to join us if you can.
A bit of history, examining and putting together the parts and lively music will follow. Mr. Lynch will be playing his bag pipes outside on the playground for all to enjoy beginning at 2:45 pm. Join us there if you cannot make the classroom experience.
**Please send a POTATO (not cooked....any kind) on Tuesday, March 17th--IT"S SUPER TUBER DAY! It is our salute to Ireland and the potato. I have K. Meier and D. Frank volunteering to help out but could use 2 more volunteers to help facilitate learning stations. The time is 10:45-11:45 am. Email me if you can help!
**Report cards go home on Friday, March 20th.
**Route to Reading will reconvene beginning Tuesday, March 17th. The 3 week rotation will conclude on Wednesday, March 25th.
**No School--Spring Break--March 28-April 5th. School resumes on Monday, April 6th. Let me know if your child needs a travel journal.
**Irving School's annual K-2 Spelling Bee will be held on Wednesday, April 15th at 11:45 am. in the Irving Auditorium. There will be 2 students representing each K-2 class. In preparation for the Bee, we will have our own "classroom bee" on Thursday, March 26th to see who will represent our class. Our "bee" will be cold--meaning no study.....anyone who wants to try out can. I will be speaking to the students this week about participating. No worries!! Remember--Students can only spell what they have knowledge of in terms of consonants and all the different vowel combos. Words will be given at random beginning with a K-1 list. The 2 top spellers and 1 alternate will be chosen. They will receive a word list from Mr. Packer (MC of the Spelling Bee!) that Friday for study.
**Do you have something you are really interested in? Do you have a question you want answered on a topic? Can you create a project out of it? Can you construct a vehicle that will keep an egg from breaking when dropped from a 3rd floor window? Think about it! Be part of Irving School's Academic Fair and Egg Drop Contest on Wednesday, April 22nd. More info to come!!!!
**Future Field Trip--Adler Planetarium--Monday, April 20th from 9-2 pm. We will need 4 volunteers help with supervision.
**We are getting closer to the collection of GIANT boxes and other cool stuff for our space station construction projects. You can bring them in after spring break.
**No Friendship Club and Mr. Packer Math due to PARCC testing. Both will resume next week.
This week:
The students continued to gather information about weather. They observed cloud types and examined weather maps and radar online. Lots of conversation on extreme weather and its meaning. We began our inquiry about what they knew about space. What is space? How were the planets formed? What is the universe? Wow! Lots to think about. The students also began their next science unit on Shadows, Sunshine, the Moon and Space. We are slowly turning our classroom into a space place! Station day activities included mixed media suns, cosmic frames for our silhouettes, word family find, sun color by code.
Reading/Language Arts: The students continued work 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 illustrations. After reading the story, the students discussed what the main idea of the story 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 reviewed target sounds Bb and Ll. They did an activity where they listened to a word and told me if they heard the target sound at the beginning, middle or end of the word. Other word work centered around adding, deleting and substituting sounds to form new words on their dry erase boards. The students reviewed the function of nouns, action words-verbs and adjectives (words that describe.) The students worked in pairs to come up with a question about the Big Book story and answer it verbally and then in writing. The students worked on decoding CVC and CVCC and CCVC words on our interactive screen. It is wonderful to hear the students read aloud during our read around. They are certainly becoming more confident readers. The first 10 minutes of class each morning has been devoted to their independent reading to a partner or themselves. Workstations included leveled readers, using the readers checklist, sentence building and recording, writing a sentence using this and do, writing a question and answering it from a story read, short vowel review, elbow chatting about story element and main events, written responses to WHAT questions, short e and short a word sort and reader's response.
Math: The students began exploration of the study of geometric solids and 3D shapes. They learned that 3D shapes are solid like cones, cubes and cylinders. 2D shapes like circles, squares and triangles are flat. Students created 2D shapes using straws and pipe cleaners and went on to experiment making 3D shapes. It was interesting for me to observe the different ways students approached the task. Next week, we will explore vocabulary related to shapes. In preparation for our new math journals, students worked on the interactive screen reading a story problem, figuring out the operation, illustrating it and writing the number sentence to solve it.
Writing: The students received their new green writing journals. There are more lines for writing and a little less space for illustrations. They were excited. Our journal prompts this week focused on their reflections about the stories, "Little Cloud" and "Nothing Sticks Like a Shadow." The students are working on refining letter formation and sentence structure. The students are becoming a bit more consistent in reading their own writing and making their own corrections. Phonetic or inventive spelling is still a big acceptable part of their word building. Lowercase letters i, e, u, and l were introduced.
Science: The students began with the inquiry question, "what makes a shadow?" Students took turns creating shadows using the overhead projector. Do we need certain elements before we can have a shadow? All students agreed we needed some kind of light source. Some commented that a body or some kind of object blocked the light source. Other students said we needed a place to see the shadow. The recipe for creating a shadow became----a light source, something to block the light and a surface in which to see the shadow on. Some students also noted that some shadows were lighter or darker. Why was that? Stay tuned for more!!!
Technology: In student small groups and individual instruction the apps Montessori Crossword, Magic Reading 2 and iTalk were used to enhanced sound blending skills, review use of consonant blends and digraphs, and emphasize work with word families. The app Oz Phonics was used to work on sentence order. Students listened to their own reading via iTalk and critiqued themselves using the Reader's Checklist. In math whole group and small group instruction worked with the apps Top-It Addition, Monster Squeeze, Butterfly Math, and Number Find. Weatherunderground and BrianPop Jr. were sources of material for weather and science.
Literature: "Sunshine and Shadows," "Chasing Shadows," "Guess Who's Shadow?" "Super Storms," "Shadows," "I Love My Shadow," "Clouds," "Walkabout Weather," "Clifford's Stormy Day Rescue," "National Geographic Kids Weather," "How Thunder and Lightening Came to Be," Poem--"The Wind," Poem--"The Four Seasons."
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