Tuesday, March 19, 2013

*Just a reminder...we DO have school this Friday, March 22nd. We do NOT have school on Monday, April 8th. Students return to school on Tuesday, April 9th.

This week's IA: Music
IA when we return from break: PE

Reader's Workshop
Students have found much joy in searching nonfiction texts for nonfiction text features. We feel like detectives when we try to find headings and subheadings. We've found that some nonfiction texts don't even have headings and subheadings. Interesting!

Writer's Workshop

Students will begin having their published writing displayed in the classroom. Here is our first set of published writers! Look at that craftsmanship and attention to detail. Bravo!

Math

We took our test on the fraction unit today. The students really enjoyed delving into the world of fractions. I can safely say that we have ALL deepened our knowledge about fractions over the last couple of weeks. 

Expedition

Before we start our Science Expedition, which we will do after break, we are working like meteorologists. Each day, we record our observations about what the sky looks like, what the air feels like, what the temperature is, what the humidity is, and what the air pressure is. Some of our data we get just from being outside. Other data we receive from weather.com. Tomorrow we will be making barometers, so we can record data from our very own weather instrument. How exciting! 

Tuesday, March 12th, 2013

We are back to our regular schedule this week, after TCAP last week.

This week's IA: Art
Next week's IA: Music

Since our schedule was so crazy last week, we ended the week on a good note. At the end of the day, we went down to Ms. Jody's classroom to meet with our Kindergarten buddies. First, we read Dr. Seuss books together. Next, we practiced some doubles cup stacking. This was a real challenge for us! To help us calm down after cup stacking, all of us practiced some yoga! What a great afternoon we had with our buddies!

Reader's Workshop
As we begin our work in science, we are focusing our reading strategies around nonfiction text. Specifically, we learning how to pay attention to and determine importance from nonfiction text features. Currently, we are reading books about weather and adding to our knowledge about weather and climate. This is connected to some work we are doing during Expedition.

Writer's Workshop
I am very excited to get the children going in our new Writer's Workshop format. I will be meeting with every child, every day during small groups in writing. This is different and we're all getting used to it. You will begin to see published pieces of writing coming home after Spring Break. While I will be sending these pieces home, I will expect that the pieces come back to school, to add to your child's portfolio. All children are currently working on descriptive writing.

Math
We are a few lessons into our fractions unit. Though these sound daunting at first, the children are really grasping the concepts around fractions. Today, we worked on equivalent fractions. We're all having fun with these math concepts!

Expedition
We have not started our full Science Expedition yet, but we are starting some of our science stand-alone studies. Today, we created a Weather Log. We will be recording weather data each day to look for patterns in weather. We are having a great time working as meteorologists. We also talked about what scientists do and how they work today. To begin our study, we talked about the Scientific Method. We learned that scientists ask questions, do background research, construct hypotheses, test hypotheses, analyze results, and share data. We love being scientists!

Monday, March 4th, 2013

Here we are, already at March 4th. How did that happen? We are ready though, to march forth :) Time just doesn't stop, does it? Even as much as we might want it to. I have so enjoyed getting to know all of your kiddos this year and look forward to sharing all of their amazing accomplishments with you at Student Led Conferences over the next couple of weeks. If you did not receive my email to sign up for a time, please let me know.

This week's IA: PE *We are climbing this week and are in need of belayers. If you have been trained, and are available to help us, we climb from 9:55-10:45, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. I know other crews would appreciate your help too. So, if you can volunteer more of your time, that would be wonderful!

Next week's IA: Art

Our Winter Voyage was a HUGE success! I hope your children expressed the same sentiments! The kids did an amazing job of showing ALL of our character traits. I was so impressed with everyone. Your children will be sharing their reflections from Adventure Education with you at their student led conferences. Here are a few pictures from our time together in Larkspur.

The week before we left on our Voyage, we had the honor of presenting our findings and graphs from the Starlighting to a panel of representatives from the Castle Rock Chamber of Commerce. Better late than never. Our graphs we very well received and they are excited to use the information we collected for them to help with planning future events. Talk about an authentic purpose and audience! 

As you know, I attended a writing conference last week. I am so very excited about the changes that will be coming to our classroom in writing! I will be showing you where your child is as a writer and where they're going, during student led conferences.