**REMINDER: SIBLING PICTURES will be taken on TUESDAY, APRIL 18th in the morning. This year is different from previous years. It is siblings only (not everyone.) The sibling(s) must attend Irving School. Please email me or sign up on the Irving website if your child is participating.
**On MONDAY, the students will begin their engineering project. The design challenge for the student groups is to design, construct, paint and detail a structure/habitat that will be used for reading and dramatic play in the classroom. We will form 3 student groups, select a project manager and chat about ground rules in order to complete the project. We have begun some conversations about the art of compromise. The students will be using all recyclable materials. The student groups will discuss and sketch prototype drawings to document what they think their structure might look like. We will be using iMovie to document from start to finish. The students are super excited! Please do not send your child in their finest clothing. We will be using tempera paint and will be wearing extra long paint shirts......but......it can still get messy! The paint is washable. The projects will take about a week. We will construct 3 structures. Please mote that we may deviate from our normal subject areas and workstation time.
**A BIG SHOUT OUT to our Spelling Bee participants JACKSON and LILY and our ever ready alternate, LILAH! They were awesome! They received a really cool ribbon. I was so proud of their perseverance. Our class made a special poster to cheer them on.
**Our Student Council Reps, Declan and Naomi D. want you to continue to send in food and money for the Student Council sponsored FOOD DRIVE. The drive will continue this week.
**CLASSROOM COIN CHALLENGE! Bring in your loose change to class the week of April 24th-28th. All money collected will benefit the Irving Library. This event coincides with the Irving Book Fair that same week. We will be visiting the fair as a class but encourage families to attend to browse or buy. Come join guest readers myself, Ms. Noonan, Ms. Durham and Ms. Grogan for our Family Reading Night on Wednesday, April 26th from 6:30-7:30 pm featuring "camping" stories.
**Stay tuned for information next week on the TRAVELING POETS PROJECT under the direction on Ms. Noonan. Each student will be selecting a poem to learn.
**The GARDEN CLUB is back! Please join us on Friday, April 21st after school to wake up the worms, clear the beds and plant peas and greens.
**Come RUN WITH ME! Come out for District 97's Annual Fun Run on Saturday, May 6th beginning at 8:00 am with the K-2 run. The event is at Lindberg Park.
**The Ethnic Festival/World Language Day is also Saturday, May 6th at Julian Middle School. The parade begins at 9:30 from Julian.
** In our Second Step lesson this week our lesson focused on how to problem solve.
**No Friendship Club this week.
**In Mr. Packer Thinking Skills this week, Mr. Packer began prep for a new project on data collecting, organizing and analyzing.
This week:
It was all about worm facts and fiction and examining and labeling worms parts, continued work on number bonds and decomposing sets (subtraction) and prep for our engineering project. Also, the students began using about 8 minutes of their time when they come in the morning to listen to or read to someone their BUSY READER story or borrowing a story to read. The students continue to work on their reading fluency and reading to someone really helps! The students are enjoying our WORD PLAY exercises that began last Friday. It is a great visual for imprinting sound order by using physical movement. This is now part of their homework each week.
Reading/Language Arts: The students continue to work on Unit 8 Plants in our Treasures Reading series. They talked about seeds and the plants that grow from them. They accessed prior knowledge from our fall unit on apples. The students revisited our apple seed tray. They also discussed what they knew about types of seeds--blowing dandelion seeds, helping their family plant seeds in their backyard and naming seeds they knew. The students listened to the Big Book story, "Seed Secrets." The story was about the ways in which seeds travel. The students observed the illustrations and tracked the print as I read. They were able to verbally ask and answer questions about the text. The students examined an unknown word--sprout. How do you know what it means? Where can you look in the text to get the meaning? Can the illustrations help you? Can other words in the sentence help you find the meaning? Target words for this week were here and was. The students worked with partners to build sentences with their sight words and pictures. We reviewed noun, verbs and adjective use. The students also revisited short u, consonant blends and digraphs in words. We also took a look at long vowel/silent e words and vowels teams. They began work on a new Blueprint focusing on comparing two texts on the same topic. We used a Venn Diagram format to compare two of our science texts--"Wonderful Worms" and "Earl the Earthworm Digs for his Life." Questions discussed--How are these texts alike? (similarities) How are the text different? Robust vocabulary for this week included GRADUALLY, SEEDS, OBSERVE. The students read the decodable story, "The Bud Is Up." They made predictions about story content and discussed what the word bud might mean. They reread the story to a partner for fluency building. Workstations this week included leveled readers, fluency checks, discussion of characters in texts and comparing the actions of the characters looking for similarities and differences, main idea elbow chats, word building, defining an unknown word from their text, short and long u word work, playing the vowel game "Bug Jar," writing and drawing about your favorite vegetable, how to story about how to grow a seed, playing the sight word game, "Popcorn," retelling a story verbally and then creating retelling cards in their own words and sound substitution work with vowels.
Math: The students are working to complete Module 4 in our Eureka Math series. The lessons focus was on representing pictorial decomposition and composition (subtracting and adding) stories to 10 with 5 group drawings and equations and stating the sum at the beginning of the equation. Workstations this week included writing numbers to 120, telling time by the hour digitally and analogue, solving simple story problems by illustrating and writing the equation, decomposing teen numbers as a group of 10 and what is left over and counting on from a given number in sequence.
Writing: The students continue to work on lowercase letter formation. The letters q and x were introduced. The students practiced on their mini boards and applied what they learned in their orange books. In Writer's Workshop this week, the students took a look at persuasive writing in the form of writing a letter to someone. What is a problem you see? How can you fix it? Who can you tell about it? What are your feelings? Can you illustrate it and add labels? The students continue to work on their "When you are done, you have just begun" checklist which includes rereading writing, conferring with a partner, adding more--reasons, drawings, labels, speech bubbles etc. and fixing up parts that are not easy to read.
Science: The students continue to work on their investigation about worms. This week, the students worked in their science notebooks creating a diagram of a worm--drawing and labeling important parts. They defined vocabulary-segment, clitellum, front, back, compost, soil. The students continue to observe the redworms in their habitat. Students are bringing in "food" to feed the worms. We asked google some questions---How many eggs in the egg sack? When are worms grownups? Next week: Comparing redworms and nightcrawlers! Cool!
Technology: The students are learning about making an iMovie in preparation for documenting their projects. In reading, small group work focused on the app Montessori Crosswords for skill building on ccvc,cvcc, short u, silent e and ck words. In math, small groups and individuals used the apps Butterfly Math, Number Bonds to 10 and Animal Math for skill building in addition and subtraction and missing addends.
Literature: "Earl the Earthworm Dig for His Life," "Domino Addition," "The Cheerios Counting Book," "Animals Two By Two-Worms," "Over in the Garden," "Nouns," "Verbs," "Adjectives." "The Garden Detective," "Underground," "The Day the Crayons Quit," "The Great Fuzz Frenzy," "King Hugo's Huge Ego," "Bunches of Bunnies," "The Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Chick."
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