**Thanks for your patience! I will combine two weeks of activities. We are all on the mend! It has been a month of sickness but hopefully SPRING will prevail and more warmer weather will help!
**There have been lots of the changes in student achievement this month. The flood gates of learning are opening wide!! In Route to Reading, many students are mastering skills to complete the Kindergarten continuum and many students have also "jumped" skills to move closer to completion. Lots of great morning story sharing between students with Busy Readers! Students are looking forward to starting their new subtraction story problem journal in April and be challenged even more by Mr. Packer's "thinking" skills projects. And yes........the students are very excited that we are getting closer to planning/creating/constructing our space stations. The week of 4/18-4/22 is set aside for this. YES......start sending GIANT boxes and cool stuff after spring break.
**Pi Day was cool! The students did some cute activities surrounding the number 3.14159. We saw a really cool video of music created by corresponding notes on a piano, xylophone, drums and flute. Pi even has its own website! We topped it off with some apple PIE for PI Day made with love by Michelle at the Happy Apple Pie Shop! The students LOVED the pie. It even had the Pi sign on the top. The students wrote and illustrated thank you notes to Michelle.
**Bagpiper Patrick Lynch was amazing! The students really enjoyed his presentation and lively, loud music. The whole school came out to hear him on a very windy but sunny day.
**Super Tuber was very fun! The students learned a little history about the potato and its connection to Ireland. They observed and measured their tubers and counted the "eyes." They looked at some different varieties even viewed and compared the skin of a purple and red potato under the microscope. I showed the class how to grow a potato from a potato and we chose Ella's (white potato) and Omar's (sweet potato) to grow on our windowsill. Stay tuned!
**Congratulations to our SPELLING BEE participants--Lauren and Zadie. They will represent our class in the Annual K-2 Spelling Bee on Wednesday, April 13th at lunchtime. Also give a shout out to Juliet who is our alternate.
**School Sprit Week was the bomb!! Pajamas, crazy hair, backwards wildness and Irving colors were the ticket of the week. Thanks Student Council for organizing it!
**Our field trip to the Field Museum was AWESOME!!! Yes..... it was the rainiest, but inside was hopping! Students worked with their parent volunteers and discussed the exhibits they wanted most to see. Sue, Ancient Egypt, Mummies, Animals, lots of Bones and Fossils were the top choices. Pictures are beginning to come in. Our writing project will be fantastic. A HUGE THANKS to E. Hagedorn, N. Bell, M. Davis, H. Alvarez and J. Wulff for volunteering!
**SPRING BREAK HOMEWORK HOLIDAY WEEK!! But.......you can still work on Lexia, Raz Kids, Xtra Math or your favorite app. Lots of students are traveling. I can't wait to read their Travel Journals. Even if you are just hanging out-----write about it!!
**Report cards are in your child's homework folder. Please sign and return the envelope.
**No Friendship Club this week or last week.
**No Mr. Packer Problem Solving this week or last week.
**Mr. Degman will resume his Math/Tech after spring break.
The past two weeks:
It was all about weather, shadows, bagpipers and fun potato facts. Science abounds in our classroom! Our study of weather includes math, reading and writing all woven together. Great fun! Very motivating. The students observed daily wind speeds, weather instruments and how meteorologists use data to make predictions about what kind of weather we will have in our area. Yes....they do not get it right all the time!! We are growing 2 types of potatoes. Stay tuned! The students loved Pi Day and bagpiper, Patrick Lynch. Station day activities included magical math facts activity, constructing 2D and 3D structures and learning to play Spring Memory Match up. The students prepared for their trip to the Field Museum. They looked for reading material and videos on Ancient Egypt, dinosaurs, mummies, extinct and endangered animals and mammals. Pictures taken during our trip will be part of a writing/research project.
Reading/Language Arts: The students worked to complete Unit 7 Weather in our Treasures Reading series. The students built background knowledge about how weather effects people and animals. Students came to the board to write what they experience in snowy, hot, rainy and cold weather. They also spoke about how animals react to those weather conditions. The students reviewed all sight vocabulary presented thus far. The students reviewed target sounds Bb, Ll and short Ee and words that describe. (adjectives) The students continued to work on segmenting, sound blending 4 and 5 sound words on their white boards along with addition, deletion and substitution activities. The students listened to the oral language selection "Animal in Winter." They recalled many of their facts from our Changing Seasons theme. Robust Vocabulary for this week included CLEAR, COZY, EXPERIENCE, HIBERNATE, RETREAT. Workstations for the first week included leveled readers, comprehension and fluency checks, vocabulary building, writing and illustrating What can you do in the rain? completing a story elements butterfly on a specific text, writing a question about your story and answering it, working with blends and digraphs and using iTalk to record and listen to your own reading. For week two, the students students mixed it up by using leveled Fountas and Pinnell texts. They worked collaboratively with their group to come up with an assignment to go with their text. I loved their interactions and suggestions! Workstations included elbow chats about story elements and doing a group story elements butterfly, chatting about problem/solution and writing about it individually, chatting about specific vocabulary and creating a word web of meanings, chatting about characters and comparing how they acted in the text. What an excellent job!
Math: The student continued their exploration of of 2D and 3D shapes. They have been using a variety of materials including straws, pipe cleaners, k-nects, magnetos and mini magnetos. Discussion centered around the terms flat, solid, sides, vertex-vertices or corners and faces of the shapes. Can that shape you constructed roll or can you only stack it? What is a rectangular prism? The students participated in a particular activity where they matched certain pictures according to their shape. The students are starting a "Structure Museum." Workstations for the past two weeks included building 2D and 3D structures, analyzing and comparing 2D and 3D shapes, reading and writing 2 and 3 digit numbers, number bonds to 10 and working with the number line to solve an addition or subtraction problem.
Writing: The students continue to work on lowercase letter formation. Letters r, n, m, h, b and f were covered in the past two weeks. They applied what they learned in their orange practice books. Their "fix it up" checklist has become a great guide as they work to refine their writing.
Science: The students began our next Science unit beginning with the inquiry--What makes a shadow? The students took turns creating shadows using an overhead projector. Do we need certain elements before we can have a shadow? All students agreed we needed some kind of light source. Some students 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. A shadow is blocked light. Some students noted that shadows can be lighter or darker...they can be seen in front of or in back of......they also observed a water shadow and the rainbow that formed. Cool! Stay tuned!
Technology: The students are getting ready for our Keyboarding Without Tears program. We will begin this after spring break. They will also be able to use it for home practice. In science, we looked at a cool app on extreme weather. Awesome live footage of rainbows, hurricanes, blizzards, thunderstorms and lightening etc. Students sought out information for their field trip via BrainPop Jr. and the Field Museum site. All the apps we have been using for reading and math continue.
Literature: "Chasing Shadows," "Guess Who's Shadow?" "Super Storms," "Clouds," "Walkabout Weather," "How Thunder and Lightening Came to Be," "Clouds, Rain and Clouds Again," "The Leprechaun Who Lost His Rainbow," "The Luckiest St. Patrick's Day Ever," "It's St. Patricks Day," "Morning, Noon and Night," 'Dinosaurs and Other Reptiles," "Fly Guy Presents Dinosaurs,""Danny and the Dinosaur," "If Dinosaurs Came Back," "What Dinosaurs Ate,""National Geographic Kids-Dinosaurs,""Raptors," "Mummies," "Ancient Egypt."
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