**The month of May is really flying by! The students are acting more and more like first graders! The are becoming very independent workers and thinkers. They are enjoying using their space stations during their morning independent reading, choice time and literacy bag reading time. Our indoor class garden is beginning to sprout! Along with our potato plants we have corn and beans germinating. The students are observing the stem and leaf structures of the marigold, morning glory, sunflower and nasturtium.
**Public Service Announcement-----With the weather warming up, many of my students will want to wear sandals. Sandals will be okay in the classroom, but I would like all students to wear gym shoes and socks as we play more outside and go on walking field trips. Let's protect our feet! Thanks for your attention to this matter.
**A presentation on the SUMMER READING PROGRAM at MAZE LIBRARY will take place on Monday, May 18th at 10:30 am in the gym. It is a super fun program for our soon to be first graders!!!!!
**Our Walking Field Trip to the OAK PARK CONSERVATORY is Tuesday, May 19th. We will walk beginning at 9:00 am and return by 11:00 am. D, Pacelli, D. Frank and P. Tapia will be walking with us. I am still missing 3 permission slips so send them in on Monday.
**Permission slips for PIZZA and PLAY End of the Year Picnic are in your child's homework folder. The cost is $2.00. The parent helper on line Sign Up Genius was sent to all families by our room parents. Please send back permission slip and money ASAP. The picinic is being held at Rehm Park on Wednesday, May 27th from 9:30-noon. Pizza, veggies and fruit along with juice and water will be served. All are invited.
**Our PACERS Running/Walking Club during Friday Lunch will continue for 2 more Fridays! Please send your child with gym shoes and socks.
**IRVING OLYMPIC DAY is FRIDAY, MAY 22nd from 8:30-11:00. If you have the time---come check us out on Team Gullo as we run, jump, ski, shoot baskets, throw, bounce, battle (with nerf balls) and test our strength, stamina and sportsmanship. Please send your child in comfortable clothes, gym shoes and socks.
**Our ABC Countdown continues. Lots of Helping with a capital H. Our Space ice cream and Earth Ice cream (crunchy vs. cold) was tasty. Ashton jumped up 22 inches on Jump High Day! Boys did rule on King Day but their rules were insightful----1. Play "Don't Spill the Beans Game". 2. Extra recess in the afternoon. 3. 2 Choice times. 4. Be honest. 5. Don't be mean. 6. Don't tell people what to so. That says it all!
**The last week of Traveling Poets is the week of May 18th-22nd. The students have been doing a fabulous job of traveling to classrooms and reciting their poems. We have enjoyed students from 4th, 5th and 3rd grades traveling to our classroom.
**The Irving Art Fest and Poetry Slam was spectacular!!! A huge SHOUT OUT to our "Lil Slammers" Ailsa and Tate and to the Blecha Family (Dad, Tate and Asa) for their participation. Great fun! The art work was beautiful, the chorus mesmerizing, the games, plays and poetry breaks cool. I had a blast. Hope you did too!
**Please check out the info in your child's homework folder on the TEACHER vs PARENT SOFTBALL GAME on Friday, May 22nd. Come on down to watch or play. Following the game is an adult only LAUGH OUT LOUD COMEDY BENEFIT beginning at 8:00 pm at the WIRE in Berwyn. Sean Flannary, parent of an Irving first grader is very funny and so is the rest of his crew. It's a fun night out full of laughs!
**Look for portfolios and writing journals from Trimesters 1 and 2 to come home this week. I am working on final assessments for our last report card period. Time flies!!!!!
**This was our last Friday with Reading Grandma Mary. She has seen much progress in our students reading, decoding and comprehension. We will really miss her! Thanks so much for your time!
**Future Walking Field Trip to the Gurgas/Chien backyard to see and hear about raising chickens will be sometime in the first week of June. Stay tuned.
**Last Day of School Family Hour--please join us for our Family Hour on Friday, June 5th from 1:45 until dismissal. We will sign autographs, have some refreshments, get our report cards and summer packets and read a closing story. There might even be something going on outside on the blacktop!!
This week:
Change is in the air! The students are sensing the end of kindergarten is near. They are thinking about new teachers, new classrooms, new friendships, new expectations. They are also thinking about students who may be moving away. Turning into a First Grader is BIG!!!! Your child may chat with you on his/her feelings about moving on. There is definitely excitement in the air---and maybe a little anxiety. We will be working through it in our classroom too! Station Day activities this week included ladybug math, seed germination sequencing part 1-illustration and building with Legos and contributing to our Lego Museum.
Reading/Language Arts: Students continue to work on skills and literature from Treasures Units 9 and 10. Sight words for this week were has and look. 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, adjectives and pronouns. Each day this week, the students worked on group substitution activities to strengthen sound recognition and automatic recording of phonemes to create words. The students read their decodable story and leveled readers independently and worked on story elements and sequencing events and then came together into small groups to discuss key details and vocabulary. Robust Vocabulary for this week included ENORMOUS, GULP, FANTASY, INCREDIBLE, REALITY. Workstations this week included leveled readers reading for meaning and fluency, word building activities using blends and digraphs, responding in writing to what you have read about, asking and answering questions about an unknown word in a text, finding details in an informational reading and clarifying the meaning of multiple meaning words and working with word families ut, et, un, en.
Math: The students continue to work on reading simple story problems, illustrating the process and writing the number sentence or equation. We have finished our first math journal and the students have brought it home. Our new math journal is one that we will start but can be continued over the summer. It contains addition and subtraction story problems, number sequencing, patterns and counting quantities. The students worked on math games this week including "Don't Spill the Beans"--facts to 10, "Sand Pail Addition and Subtraction," "Blastoff" (greater/less than) and "Carnival" using 2 or 3 dice--addition.
Writing: The students continue to work on refining their writing, They are choosing many of our daily writing topics. We will begin our final writing project on the topic of "Worms" next week. We will also begin to reflect in writing on all of our wonderful volunteers and teachers that have worked in our classroom.
Science: The students continued their study of seeds I can't wait to read their plant updates on how their plants are doing at home. This week we observed the inside of a seed. We soaked pinto beans and pea seeds in warm water overnight. The students observed the soaked seeds were bigger! Yes--the water climbed up into the spaces in the seed! With some assistance, the students split their seeds 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 seed food where the seed gets its nourishment. The students made a diagram in their science journals labeling parts of the seed. The students made sketches of their particular baby plant and noted the leaf structure and shape. In Experiment 5, the question was asked--What if the seed had no soil? Could it still germinate/sprout? Each table had a sponge where the students sprinkled seeds on it and then watered it well. It was placed in a sunny window. The student made their predictions about what will happen. They also put 5 different kinds of seeds in a ziplock bag with a wet paper towel. What will happen? Stay tuned!!! Next week--Examining root systems. Preparing for worms!
Technology: Our Space Station iMovie is almost ready! The students are already thinking about an end of the year movie. Oh my!!! In reading workstations, students small groups used the apps Magnetic ABC to work on sentence making and word building, Reading Magic for blending and segmenting activities and RocketSpeller for sound sequencing and sound blending, Whole group activities included the apps CVC Sound Sorts, Oz Phonics for Word Finder, Sentence Word Order, and missing CCVC and CVCC words and Montessori Crosswords focus on short u and short e words and silent e words. In math workshop, student small groups worked on the apps Subitize Tree, Sam Phibian and Butterfly Math Addition. Whole group work centered on the app Number Find. In science, the students watched a seed germinating sequence and video on raised bed gardening which is the type of gardening we will be doing outside.
Literature: "The Tiny Seed," "Eating the Alphabet," "I Am the King," "Spring Changes," "Plants," "The Bug Patrol," "Muncha, Muncha, Muncha," "Leaves," "The Reason for a Flower."
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