**Our FIELD TRIP to ADLER PLANETARIUM is MONDAY, APRIL 20th. Please send a BAG LUNCH (nut free) and dress for the weather! We would love to picnic by the lake--weather permitting. Keep your fingers crossed!! It will definitely not be as warm as the weekend. The students will be seeing the IMAX movie, "One World, One Sky," exhibits Our Solar System, Shoot the Moon and Planet Explorers--an interactive exhibit. It is going to be a great time! Thanks to our volunteers K. Meier, J. Blecha, D. Frank, C. Wojcik and Navid's mom for their time.
**The Opera for the Young's presentation of "Beauty and the Beast" was terrific! Great singing, costumes and staging! The student parts were exceptional!!
**The Spelling Bee was one for the books!! Our class reps Juancarlos and Jeremy went thru several rounds before stepping down. Great poise and control. A big SHOUT OUT to Jeremy!! He was the last kindergarten student standing! Another SHOUT OUT to Evelyn, our class alternate, who was super ready to step in at a moments notice!
**The Academic Fair/Egg Drop Contest is Wednesday, April 22nd. Please make sure you have registered online or with paper form. I can get you a paper form. The online information is on the Irving Website. There is still time left to create a vehicle or do a project! Students with projects can bring them for set up in the gym before school begins. Our class will visit the Fair in the morning. The projects will be displayed during the day. Students with projects will return in the evening from 6:30-7:30 pm when families and the community will view and hear about the projects. Students can bring in their Egg Drop Vehicle on Wednesday morning. The contest will begin at 12:45 pm on the black top. Students will drop their vehicle from the third floor window. Please join us if you can. It should be very exciting! I know there are students building vehicles and a least 2 students with projects. Way to represent!!'
**Our class was able to donate $20.00 to the All for Books Coin Challenge! Thanks so much for your donations.
**The Irving Book Fair will take place this week (4/20-4/23.) A flyer with information is in your child's homework folder.
**Route to Reading Rotation 7 will conclude on Wednesday, April 22nd. At that time you will receive notification on your child's skill mastery.
**Help Mr. Sak!!! He needs family teams for Irving's Family Trivia Night which will be held on Wednesday, April 29th from 6:30-8:00 pm at Irving. The money raised will benefit the 5th grade. See the Irving website for sign up and details.
**Student Council's Food Drive continues until April 28th. We are already on our second box of donated food. Coins/Dollars will also be accepted. Please send non perishable food, baby food, toiletries, diapers etc. Let's help the Oak Park Food Pantry!!
**Upcoming event--TRAVELING POETS, under the direction of Ms. Noonan. Watch for information about this really cool school wide event. This event is the weeks of May 11th and 18th. The students will be choosing their poem this week. Stay tuned!
**LAST CALL for GIANT BOXES and OTHER COOL STUFF!! Our project week in April 27th-May 1st. Next week, we will form our working groups, select a project manager and sketch a "prototype" drawing of what our space station might look like.
**In Friendship Club this week, Ms. Bell Bey continued her lesson on SMART GUESSES on social situations.
**In Mr. Packer Problem Solving this week, Mr Packer did a cool lesson on using learning clues to solve a mystery. How do you go about figuring out what a good clue is? We listen, we think and we look or observe. We are learning detectives!!
This week:
It was all about telling time with our sundials, learning about the moon and getting ready for our field trip. The students also welcomed a baby red fox exhibit case and information about this local area mammal. "He" will be visiting our classroom and observing us as we observe him for the next 2 weeks. Also, as part of our Unit on Plants, we also have "Who lives in the oak tree?-- puppet theater with a squirrel, cottonwood beetle and pileated woodpecker. Thanks to birdwatcher, Tate for educating us on the pileated woodpecker! Station Day activities this week included small group moon surface experiment to create craters and "seas", moonscape creations, making jet packs for future space travel, and sequencing the planets in order using our space song.
Reading/Language Arts: The students continue to work on Unit 8 Plants in our Treasures Reading series. They talked and read about seeds and the plants that grow from them. They accessed prior knowledge from our earlier fall unit on apples. The students revisited our apple seed tray. The students also discussed seeds--blowing dandelion seeds everywhere, helping their parents plant seeds in their backyard gardens and the types of seeds they know about. The students listened to the Big Book story, "Seed Secrets." The story contained ways that seeds travel. The students observed pictures and tracked the print as I read the story. They were able to verbally ask and answer questions about the text. The students also examined an unknown word--sprout. How do you know what it means? Where can you look to get help with the meaning. Can the illustrations help you? Can other words in the sentence help you? Our target words for this week are here and was. The students worked with partners to build sentences using all their sight words. 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 created a recall list about how seeds travel. In additional vocabulary development, students reviewed positional words. The students worked with their white boards on exercises involving adding, deleting and substituting sounds. We revisited consonant blends and digraphs at the beginning and ending of words. The students read aloud their decodable story, "The Bud is Up." They made predictions about story content and discussed what the perhaps unknown word bud might mean. They reread their story to a partner to practice fluency. Our Robust Vocabulary for this week included GRADUALLY, SEEDS, OBSERVE. Workstations this week included leveled reader, story elements and main idea elbow chats, word building--defining an unknown word from their story-using illustrations and other words, walk your words--sight word review, writing a complete sentence using the word--little, word search for short u words, beginning sound substitution sentence building with short u words, story elements butterfly, short vowel review, readers response to a story, recording their reading via iTalk.
Math: The students continue to work on counting and writing numbers beyond 100, counting on from a random number and counting by 2's, 5's and 10's beyond 100. Students continue to work on 2D and 3D shape recognition and actual building of shapes. Our "Structure Museum" looks very awesome! In Mr. Degman's math session this week, students worked on creating 2D shapes and then recorded the name name of the shapes and how many sides it had using an app called Educeations. They loved hearing their own voice and all of their recordings were projected on the screen. The story problem math journals continue to motivate the students to present their work to one another. Students are reading their own story problem, showing it on a ten frame, illustrating it and writing their number sentence. Each day a lucky student is chosen to be the teacher and review their story problem and process with the class.
Writing: The students are beginning to work on their shadow pose paragraphs. Their draft is their first writing that can be corrected, changed or reworked. Stay tuned!'
Science: Yes----we had sun this week! In our last sun experiment we read information about the first clocks--using the position of the sun to tell the time of day. We did an internet search of sundials. There were many different types. The students worked with their table mates to construct a sundial using a piece of paper, a dowel and clay to secure the dowel. They wrote the numbers on their paper like clock numbers. Students brought their sundials outside beginning at 8:30 am. They observed the shadow cast by the dowel was very close to pointing to the 9. Back in class, they made a diagram of the sundial and made a arrow to the time the shadow cast. They also sketched a picture of something they would be doing at that time. The students checked their sundials again at noon and before doing home. They recorded where the dowel shadow was and made a sketch of something they were doing at that time. Many students commented that the shadows change as the sun's position in the sky changes. Yes!!!! Students also pondered the question--What is the moon? They compared elements of the daytime and night time sky. They discovered that unlike the sun, the moon can be seen in both the day and night sky. The students discussed the terms sunrise and sunset and their true meaning. In learning about the moon, we used internet resources to view the moon's surface. In an experiment, the students recreated the moon's surface using flour and cocoa powder as the moons surface and then dropped magnetic marbles on it to create the craters (holes) and "seas" (flat places.) Very cool! They also made moonscapes by gluing packing peanuts onto a circular paper and then covering it with aluminum foil so all the craters and seas showed. The students took a look at the different shapes the moon appears to make at night in the course of a month. It appears the "phases" repeat themselves like a pattern each month. The students reflected in their journal their thoughts and sketches. We talked about our upcoming field trip and what the students would be seeing and read about the planets, space travel and space vehicles.
Technology: The students saw some cool videos about the sun, moon and solar system via BrainPop Jr. We also used the an app about locating constellations. The students continued to be fascinated by star pictures in the sky! In reading whole/small and individual work students used the apps OzPhonics, Montessori Crossword for skill building on cvc, ccvc, cvcc and short u and ck words. The app Magnetic ABC's was used to work on sentence writing. In Math, Mr. Degman used the app Educreations to create and record student responses on 2D shapes. Students continued to use the apps Geometry, Build a Pic and Butterfly Math to enhance understanding of 2D and 3D shapes and addition and subtraction problems. Students are using iTalk to record their reading and play back for fluency practice.
Literature: "The Moon Book," "Finding the Moon," "Magic School Bus--Walks on the Moon," "Phases of the Moon," "Moon," "My Place in Space," Smart Words Series--Stars, Space Rocks, Planets, Space Exploration."
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