Monday, April 29, 2013

I hope you all enjoyed the beautiful weather this weekend! 

This week's IA: PE

Next week's IA: Art

Reader's Workshop

Since we are learning about wolves in Expedition, we are going to tie in reading with this. We will begin our Fairy Tale study this week. Our main focus will be on characters, and specifically, how wolves are portrayed in these stories. We'll compare and contrast these characters with facts we learn in Expedition.

Writer's Workshop

You will begin to see your child's writing coming home in a purple folder. Please take a look at it, and put it back in the folder to return to school the next day. The writing pieces will then be placed in your child's portfolio. Thanks for helping your child make sure his or her writing comes back to school, in the purple folder, the next day.

Math

We are continuing to get more experience with money. Today, we learned how to compare costs of items. The word we paid attention to was "difference." This clued us in to know that we need to subtract when we are comparing costs. 

Expedition

What a wonderful day of fieldwork we had last Thursday!! The Colorado Wolf and Wildlife Center was amazing. We learned so much about wolves, from adaptations they have to how they interact with their habitat. We also learned why we should care if they are endangered. Before we left, we got to interact with the wolves by communicating with them through howling. Such a cool experience! 

Monday, April 22, 2013

And yet another snowy afternoon out the window as I type this. I wonder when it will ever be sunny again???

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

*Our field work to the Colorado Wolf and Wildlife Center is this Thursday, April 25th. Students will need their day packs packed with two snacks, a lunch. I will go over the other supplies they need to have packed with them.

Reader's Workshop
We are integrating our expedition with Reader's Workshop. For read alouds, we are reading books that teach us about animal adaptations. While we listen to and read these texts, we are working on determining the important information and summarzing what we learn.

Writer's Workshop
Our writing has improved so much! We are all being more aware of the mistakes we make when we write and fixing those mistakes on the run. We're also choosing some very descriptive words to describe our topics to our readers.

Math
Our next unit, that we will begin on Tuesday, is all about place value and decimal points. We will also spend some more time working with money.

Expedition
Our new case study is well under way. We have spent time reading texts about wolves, becoming experts, teaching others what we know, and learning more from expert speakers. Last week, we had two officers from the Division of Parks Wildlife teach us about wolf adaptations, Thursday at our field work.

Monday, April 15th, 2013

Yet another snowy April day. While I sure appreciate the moisture, I sure would like for our nice Spring Colorado weather to show up and stay awhile.

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

Reader's Workshop
Last Friday, I attended another workshop to learn some more strategies for teaching reading. I am very excited about what I learned and can't wait to implement the changes. I will attend the final training this coming Friday. Once I implement the new resources, I'll share more about just what your children will be learning as readers.

Writer's Workshop
The students have really taken to our new approach to Writer's Workshop. They are producing a lot of quality writing. Some of the learning targets we have been focusing on are writing complete sentences (all the time!), naming the topic in our first sentence, using specific adjectives, and varying our sentence beginnings. Their first published pieces of writing will be coming home soon. I just ask that once the writing does come home, please send it back to school so that I may put it in your child's portfolio.

Math
Currently, we are learning about perimeter, area, and capacity, as well as other measurements. I will be talking with the students in class a lot about these words so that they hear and use them frequently, but it would be great if you could talk about these concepts at home too, to really solidify them. Maybe share a time you had to use perimeter, area, or capacity in your home or work. It would be great to hear some of these stories from the students during Morning Meeting.

Expedition
Wow! The kids are so excited for our new case study!! Last week, we revealed that we will be studying wolves. I will explain, in more detail, at a later date just why we are learning about wolves. Thank you to everyone who volunteered to drive for our Field work in a couple of weeks. I will email all of you to confirm. Here are some pictures of the kids taking a more in-depth look at wolf artifacts to build their background and spark their curiosity.

Wednesday, April 10th, 2013

Welcome back!

I hope you all enjoyed your Spring Break, including our extra day! I spent time with my family and read and relaxed. It was wonderful!

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

Today we began our Science Expedition. To kick it off, we viewed our mystery piece. This mystery piece included artifacts, photographs, maps, audio, and text. Students observed the pieces, then worked independently to try to figure out how all of the pieces fit together and what our science case study might be. Tomorrow, students will work collaboratively to continue to try to solve our mystery. Check with your child tomorrow to see what his or her thinking is.

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.