Happy Holidays!

We have had a busy week and half on Team Esprit!  We've been learning a lot and having  lot of fun with our varied activities!

We began the week with our last visits from Susannah, our Flynn Theater teacher.  She chose one the Red Clover picture books called Lindbergh: The Flying Mouse and helped us bring it to life through movement and sound effects.  This is a story about a mouse who needs to get away all the troubles and mouse traps in Germany and he decides to create a flying machine to fly to America.  After many attempts, he finally makes it!  It is a great story of perseverance!  With Susannah, we made a sound track with sound effects to go along with a bad dream that Lindbergh might have had prior to his flight.  The sound effects included cats meowing, owls screeching, and traps snapping.  It was quite a production!  The next day we acted out Lindbergh's flight.  It was fun to watch the children's interpretations of the story and his flight.

During science, we finished our weather unit with an engineering project.  We challenged our students to create a structure that could withstand hurricane force winds. The structure had to have four walls, 2 windows and a door.  The materials they could use were index cards, pattern blocks, tape, string, plastic wrap, and popsicle sticks.  In partnerships, the children first created a design plan for their structure and had to submit a list of materials.  Then we tested it out using our hurricane winds (a leaf blower!)!  Be sure to ask your child about his or her structure.  Did it stand up to the wind?  What allowed it to stay standing?  How could have his or her design be improved?

We are so glad that so many of you could attend our Publishing Party and admire our hard work with our nonfiction books.  After two months of work writing, re-writing, illustrating, editing, and revising, we were happy to finally have an audience. We hope you enjoy our books and learned a lot! Next up, we will be writing opinion speeches about something we want to change here at school or in the world!

Lastly, we spent some time crafting and wrapping gifts!  We hope you enjoy the two small gifts your child is bringing home. Wishing you and your family a wonderful holiday season!  Please note school resumes on January 4th. Here's to a healthy and happy new year for us all!  Happy 2016!