Week ending 5/18/18

Hello families!
We've had a great busy week!  We've been wrapping up our math and butterfly units and delving into our writing workshop unit.

Important information:

• If you have any tissues, cleaning wipes, or paper towels...we would love them!
• Please begin sending your child in with 2 paper bags.  1 will be for artwork after the art show and 1 will be for our work at the end of the year. 
• Color day is June 5th and our Museum of Children's field trip is on June 7th.  More info coming soon.  
• Save the date!  Friday, June 8th, 8:30 we will be having an end of year writing celebration.  We hope you can join us!  

3, 2, 1 things happening in room 250!

3 science activities we completed this week were identifying the parts of a butterfly, comparing a moth and a butterfly, and identifying and drawing the stages of the plant life cycle and butterfly life cycle.  Today we let the butterflies go and the students' loved it!

* Ask your child to name 4 parts of the butterfly.  

2 writing strategies for poems we worked on were writing poems with line breaks to make our poetry more interesting to the reader and writing poems based on wonderings or questions we had.  

* Ask your child what they have been writing about in poetry.

1 fabulous activity we had this week was a visit from Mr. Joe and Ms. Vida from Ghana.  They are wonderful, engaging, and share so much knowledge with the students!  

* Ask your child their favorite part!

** Be sure to check your email for some pics from their visit!

Week Ending 5/11/18

What a beautiful week it's been!  The weather has been so great to get outside, play games, run around, and just enjoy the warmer temperatures.  I hope you've been able to get outside for some family time as well.

Important information:

• The Art Show is Thursday, May 24th in the evening.
• There is no school on Monday, May 28, for Memorial Day.  
• If you have any wipes, paper towels, or tissues, please send them in for us! Thank you!
• If you're looking for some great Fun Friday activities to do with your family this summer, here's a list of free things going on all summer: Free Friday Summer Activities

3, 2, 1 things you should know about our week here in Room 250...

3 math activities we worked on were solving a stretch your mind problem called Color Day and determining the distance and the time it would take to get across the gym.  This is important because it allows students to solve the problems as their mind sees it and gives an opportunity to explain how they solved it to other students in the class.  We talked about how we may get to a specific answer...but how we got there could be very different and that's part of being good mathematicians.  In math we also talked about how measuring with one common tool is important such as a meter stick, versus different sized kids, and then we practiced measuring each other with a tape measure and comparing our heights, and more.

2 activities we completed in science were observations of our growing caterpillars and chrysalis and we also observed our growing plants.  Many of them are much higher than last week!  

* Ask your child what they noticed about their plants.

1 new unit we began this week is poetry for reading and writing.  This week we focused on how poet's decide what to write about, poets write what they know,  and what or who is important to us so we have ideas to write about.

* Ask your child one idea they wrote on their poetry heart.  

Have a great weekend!