**The students enjoyed the Bagpipe presentation by Patrick Lynch. They had some great questions about where the sound comes from on a bagpipe and Mr. Lynch's traditional dress. It was very chilly and wet so our outside bagpipe concert was short to protect the instrument.
**Super Tuber Day was spectacular! Check out Alice's potato!!! The students learned some facts about Ireland and where it is on the map. They also learned about how potatoes came to Ireland and used their magnifiers to find the "eyes," used cubes to measure the length and sketched their potato. They had a blast weighing their potato using a scale and teddy bears counters. Alice had to estimate how many because even after 69 teddy bears, the scale did not budge! The students spent the rest of their station day choosing a variety of activities using thinking, writing, math, coloring. Thanks to S. Raphael for her help!
**Thanks to all who PACKed the rainbow of fruits, veggies and grains into their child's lunch for PACK Week. It really brought a greater awareness to eating healthier.
**Don't forget to stop by the Oak Park Village Hall to view the work of our Kindergarten student artists! Ms. Gullo's class is exhibiting their "Symmetry Butterflies" under the direction of guest artist, Jonathan Franklin. They will be on display until the end of April.
**We will have our classroom "spelling bee" on Monday. All the students will participate! Upon conclusion of the bee, we will have our 2 students and 1 alternate who will represent our room in the Irving Annual Spelling on Wednesday, April 12 during the lunch hour.
**NEXT WEEK IS SPIRIT WEEK!!! Student Council has decreed the following: Monday--Pajama and Stuffed Animal Day.....Tuesday--Twin Day (you can call a friend and dress alike or dress like a teacher)....Wednesday--Decade Day (dress like the 50's, 60's, 70's 80's etc.).....Thursday--Each grade level will dress in a different color! Kindergarten wears PURPLE......Friday--Show your Irving School Spirit by wearing red, black, white or any Irving wear.
**PTO Cultural Event--"Justin and Liam" is Thursday, March 23rd at 9:15 am.
**We will use the photos taken on our flied trip to the Field Museum in a writing project next week. I have most of them. If you were a chaperone and haven't sent them, please do. Thanks!
**We will also visit our Book Buddies next Friday for a project in their classroom.. The students are excited to see what it is like on the 3rd floor!
**After spring break---Send in all the giant boxes and cool stuff you have been saving for our engineering project! It will be exciting! Our engineering project is schedule for the week of April 17-21. Please send everything in by April 14th.
**Spring Break is 3/27-3/31. School resumes on Monday, April 3rd. Some of you have let me know but if your child is traveling email me so I can send along a travel journal.
**NO SCHOOL--April 4th--Teacher's Institute Day.
**No Friendship Club or Mr. Packer Thinking Skills this week due to their involvement in PARCC testing.
**In our Second Step lesson this week, we reviewed and revisited managing feelings and saw a Brain Pop video on Anger.
This week:
It was all about bagpipes, potatoes, weather. Science abounds in our classroom! Our unit on Weather in reading also included math and writing activities. Great fun! Very motivating! The students observed wind speeds, read and saw pictures of weather instruments and how meteorologists use data to make predictions about what kind of weather we will have in our area. Yes...it's true.....they do not get it right all the time! The United States has many different kinds of weather during each season depending upon where you live. Our tubers are in water and we will be watching them. Awesome fun investigating potatoes! Bagpiper, Patrick Lynch put together his bagpipes and played some cool tunes. Wow! It was loud! Station Day activities included Super tubers and activities containing reading, writing, math, following directions, what makes the colors of the rainbow and coloring by code.
Reading/Language Arts: The students continue to work on Unit 7 Weather in our Treasures Reading series. The students built background knowledge about how weather affects animal and people. Students came to board to write what they experience in snowy, rainy and cold weather. They also discussed how animals react to those conditions. The students reviewed all sight vocabulary learned thus far and reviewed target sounds Bb, Ll, short Ee and words that describe--adjectives!
The students continued to work on segmenting, sound blending 4-5 sound words on their white boards along with addition, deletion and substitution activities. Robust vocabulary this week included CLEAR, EXPERIENCE, HIBERNATE, RETREAT. The students worked on a blueprint about how the actions of a character affect the story (author's words and message) and sequencing those actions using the text "Sheila Rae, the Brave." Students worked on story vocabulary, sequencing the order of events and the story elements of character, setting and locating key details. In preparation for our blueprint, students elbow chatted about the events and characters and acted out key events that showed the characters actions. Workstations this week included leveled readers with fluency building and comprehension check/discussion, vocabulary development, writing and illustrating about your favorite season and what activities you can do, read and rhyme cut and paste word families, roll, say and read blend and digraph words, read and spell cvc words, writing about a favorite picture in the text and telling what information the picture gives you, playing words games "Chomp,"(substituting sounds) "Humpty Dumpty (short vowels) "Word Construction," (word families) and "Build a Word."
Math: The students continue work on Module 4 in our Eureka Math series. Lessons are shifting focus now to work on finding how many are left in a story problem. (subtraction/decomposing numbers) Students are illustrating their thinking by beginning with a picture of a group of objects--listening to the story--and crossing out what is going away. The students are taking a look at the horizontal presentation of the subtraction number sentence using the minus sign. Students used a variety of objects when practicing with partners and telling a take away story.
Writing: The students continue to work on lowercase letter formation. They worked on lowercase j and p. They practiced on their mini boards and applied what they learned in their orange books. In Writer's Workshop this week, the students began a new unit on persuasive writing. The unit includes opinion writing, persuasive writing and writing to create change. We began with chatting about a problem that occurs in school (the topic) and thinking of a way to fix the problem. The students had many ideas including--running in the hall, not finishing their food at lunch, not following the Eagle Essential....... Starting very simply, the students--see a problem--think--write what they might do to fix it. Stay tuned!!!
Science: The weather was not very conducive for our next investigation, so we kept it inside of our classroom. Students created slopes of all magnitudes! They used many items from our classroom. They also used objects from the classroom they thought would hold off a collision or make a big collision. A variety of ball types were used--soccer, whiffle, tennis, mini super. It was collision mania!!! So much fun! Lots of great conversation about slope, speed, direction, size of the ball, size of the barrier. Wow--when objects collide they push one another which can change the motion. The students sketched and wrote their reflections in their science notebook. Next week will be our final investigation for our study on Materials and Motion---using air to propel a balloon rocket. How can we manage how far a balloon rocket will travel? We will be making one!!! Stay tuned!!
Technology: The students used the same apps as last week to continue to enhance the skills of segmenting/blending, adding/deleting sounds, cvc, ccvc, cvcc words, sentence word order, addition and subtraction problems to 10, finding the missing addends.
Literature: "Sheila Rae, the Brave," "It's St. Patrick's Day," "Snow Dude," "The Leprechaun who Lost His Rainbow," "The Enormous Potato," "Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato," "Weather Instruments," "What Makes the Wind?" "The Cloud Book," "Clifford's Story Day Rescue."
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