April Showers and Blustery Winds 4/7/17

Post date: Apr 8, 2017 9:59:41 PM

Well, our Friday was the perfect way to practice our current Habit of Mind focus: Thinking Flexibly!

The weather provided quite a few changes to flex with along the day....routes to and from school were blocked, our time in the school garden was cancelled, the power was out briefly....Yikes! However, we survived the day and I'm hoping the weather gets this out of its system so everyone can enjoy a pleasant weekend.

We had a great week back after Spring Break. Everyone settled back into our routines well. It was wonderful to return to school to such a warm welcome. I got to hear lots of stories of travel and fun with family and friends. I'm so glad everyone made it safely back to school, too!

Language Arts

This week we finished our focused on the letter "U". We've been practicing a lot more identifying the multiple sounds each vowel makes. Our focus for this week, however, was more on the short vowel sound. We've read and completed some mini books with lots of short vowel words in them. Think "jug, bug, tug, rug, tub, rub, etc..." We've also done some sound sorting...trying to stretch out our short vowel words and hear the middle sounds and ending sounds.

We read aloud a story called, The Relatives Came. Our discussion about the book was great - we got to compare how we felt and what we did when we traveled or when relatives came to visit us. We also talked about how important it is to think flexibly - everyone has to share the space and food.

We also read a story that revisited one of the characters we met earlier in the year. In this story Sam has grown up and has a very interesting grandfather who chooses "unusual" gifts...what a great word that uses both sounds of "u"!

In our writing workshop, we started talking about opinion writing and persuasive writing. We made our first attempt at writing about something each child thought was the best...One option was to write about the best way to celebrate their birthday if they could choose anything. The other option was to write about their favorite season of the year and why. As a first attempt, everyone gave it their best try! We'll keep honing our ideas so that we have a great writing piece to publish.

Math

This month, our calendar is a pattern of measuring tools. We've been talking about which "cool tool" to use for length, volume, mass, or temperature. In addition to this, we've added a new component of spinning for toads and frogs. Each day, we spin to see which critter we'll add and then we can write a new equation to go with the spin. We'll be using these examples to help write and solve more story problems.

We've also begun to explore similarities and differences of 2-D and 3-D shapes a little more deeply. On Monday, we completed a "Shoo Fly" quilt with triangle patterns. It was a challenge to get our pattern the same for each row and column. We then had a mystery bag of two dimensional and three dimensional shapes that we first named and then sorted. This unit continues the exploration of shapes in a variety of ways which will be a lot of fun!

Science / Social Studies

We began this unit by studying weather and its effects on the earth. Then we looked at homes around the world. We looked carefully at the natural materials used for each home. It was interesting to try to figure out what kind of weather they needed to have protection from. Then we began to think about our own mini-shelters. We will work with our garden specialist Lauren to build little "bug hotels". Then we'll observe our creations over the next few weeks to see how they change when exposed to our NW environment.

As we transition, our next unit of study will be community helpers.