Week ending 3/29/19

We're almost to 50 days left of school!  Can you believe how many days we've done already?

Important information:

• April vacation is the week of April 14th.  If you will be leaving before then or returning after break is over, please let us know.  
• If you have extra any boxes of tissues around, we'd love to have them!  Allergies have hit the room already!

3, 2, 1, things happening in room 250...

3 math games we played this week were Close to 100, Plus and Minus 10 and 100, and Guess My Number.  All of these help us focus and practice place value skills and adding and subtracting within 1,000.  Ask your child which game they liked the most, why, and who they played with.

2 read aloud we worked on today was Who Am I? poems and Things by Eloise Greenfield.  All of the poems this week, we focused on making inferences on what's happening in the poem using the context clues and our own scheme (or background knowledge).  

1 art in reading activity we completed this morning was writing Who Am I? poems, sharing with a partner for them to infer what the animal or occupation is, and then adding their drawing with pencils, markers, and oil pastels.   Ask your child to read to their poem to you so you can guess too!

Here's some examples of our art this morning as well as a few of us planting seeds, getting ready for our Fast Plants to grow.  

 

 

Week Ending 3/15/19

It's beginning to feel a little bit more like Spring!  I know next week will be cooler, but hopefully we've turned a corner!  What is your favorite family Spring activity?  We love to hike with the dog and enjoy the fresh air.

Important information:

• Field trip Monday, March 18th.  Please be sure to send your child in with lunch in a brown bag or large Zip-Loc.  We will not be bringing our lunch boxes with us, though they can leave a snack in them and leave them in their lockers for our return.  
• Conference begin next week so please remember that this is a time for you and your child to attend.  The students have been practicing how to present their work to you to show what they've been working on.  
• Thursday is an early release day with dismissal at 12:30.
• Save the date for Friday, June 7th, at 8:45 for about an hour, for our Integrating the Arts morning and end of the year share.

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

3 new math games we learned were Make a Dollar (focusing on combinations to $1.00), Capture 5 (using strategy to add or subtract tens and ones to capture squares), and Plus or Minus 9 Bingo (focusing on the +9, -9 strategy).  *Ask your child which game they enjoyed the most, why, and who they played with.

2 reading workshop read alouds we heard were Tornado and No Bones About It.  With both texts, we focused on reading with a question in our mind to give us a purpose for reading and working with questions that were answered or not answered.  We are understanding that it's ok that not questions will be answered with the text and that's ok! 

1 game we played with iPads and the Epson projector was Kahoot!  We used the game to finish up our Mexico unit.  The students have been writing their own Mexico information books on geography, food, holidays, or animals and they gave me their most interesting fact and I used that to create their questions.  This is always a hit!

Week Ending 3/8/19

We had our first snow day!  I hope you all got out and had a chance to play in the snow or take the time to curl up with a good book or bake some yummy treats!  While I enjoyed the snow day, I'm ready for Spring to come!

Important information:

• Be sure to send in snow pants, boots, etc for recess time.
• If you have yet to sign up for conferences with your child, please do.  If you can't come in person, we can certainly do a phone conference.  

3, 2, 1 things you should know about our week...

3 read alouds we heard this week were Officer Buckle and Gloria, Time for Kids - Spiders, and Recess at 20 Below.  We used these to begin thinking about questioning.  This skill is so important because to be a good questioner, they must be thinking about the story the whole time they are reading so their question is relevant to where they are in the text.  

The class found it so funny in Recess 20 Below that the kids' eye lashes would freeze and become frosty! Be sure to ask your child about what it's like to have recess there in Alaska.  

2 math activities we worked on were collecting date from the 4th grade classes regarding how many teeth each child in 4th grade lost and then using that date to create a representation to share with others.  We also worked on using data from different classes to make a line plot and then switching our data with a peer.  When we switched, we had to look closely at that data and determine which class the data matched.  They were great detectives!  

1 activity we worked on the morning was Team Building Friday!  We are doing this one Friday a month to target working on the school values of cooperation, assertion, responsibility, empathy, and self-control.  The activities are fun, but they also only work when they are able to work on these values at the same time as enjoying the activities.  Today we did Body Parts, All Aboard, and Human Alphabet!  Ask your child which activity they liked the most!  

Here's a few pic of All Aboard: