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!