Read Across America

Our first week back from February break will be another busy one!  On Wednesday, March 2nd, our school will participate in Read Across America Day. This is a day to celebrate Dr. Seuss' birthday and to celebrate reading!  We will have a school wide assembly in the morning, followed by guest readers visiting our classroom throughout the day.  This week we made special hats to wear to the school wide assembly to celebrate Read Across America Day. This year's theme is "Wild About Reading" so our hats are decorated with animal prints. Be sure to ask your child about the animal print design on his or her hat!

We will be traveling to the Flynn Theater on Thursday, March 3rd to see "Frindle".  We will leave around 9 am and be back for lunch and recess. Frindle is the story of a boy who decides to start calling a pen a frindle.  This causes much chaos in his school and his town.  We have read the book already so we are looking forward to seeing it brought to life on stage!  Today we enjoyed a companion workshop the Flynn provided for us to support our understanding of Thursday's performance.   Everyone had a terrific time during the workshop, reading from a script from the show and acting out parts of the book, and we are very excited to see the show on March 3rd.

This week we finished our measurement unit in math and will be moving on to a new unit after the February break that will focus on multiplication and division.  We also finished our persuasive speeches and will begin a new writing unit through which we will be adapting fairy tales and writing our own fairy tales.  We will continue studying characters and how characters change throughout the month of March.  In science we will begin learning about heredity and variation of traits.

We look forward to meeting with everyone in March for parent/teacher conferences.  If you have not already done so, please visit our google site to sign up for a date and time.
We hope everyone has a happy, relaxing and safe winter break!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Well this was quite a week: the book fair, Kindergarten concert, Hands on Nature, Vermont Writes Day, and Valentine's Day!  As you can imagine the excitement and energy levels were high this week with so many fun and different activities going on!

This month's Hands on Nature theme was sound.  Through a puppet show and several hands on experiments we learned how sound travels and we learned about how the ear works.  Our ears are amazing!  We had fun testing out tuning forks and doing an experiment to see if sounds are different when the waves travel through the air versus traveling through a solid.  Be sure to ask your child about our Hands on Nature session this week!  As always, thanks to our volunteers for providing us with this enriching opportunity each month.

This week we also celebrated Vermont Writes Day.  This is a tradition for our school during which all students write for seven minutes on this day about a topic provided by the Young Writer's Project.  Some of the topics this year included:  

• You are granted a singular wish. Write about what happens after you ask for it. How does it affect your life?
• Out of nowhere, an object falls from the sky, landing directly at your feet. What is it and what happens next?

What did your child write about?  There will be a display of Vermont Writes Day writing in the hallway (by the ramp) near the Treehouse team.  Be sure to check it out!  Speaking of writing...we continue to work on our persuasive speeches.  We should be ready to publish these shortly with the hopes of bringing some changes to our school or town!  We are working hard to have these published on Google Slides so that you can see and hear their persuasive speeches soon!

In Reader's Workshop, we continue our study of characters using Because of Winn Dixie as our mentor text.  We have looking at the characters and are digging deeper, trying to determine why these characters behave like they do.  Then once we have a deeper knowledge of our characters and a better sense of who they are, we can use that information to make predictions about how a character may act later in the story. Which character is your child studying?  Can your child make any predictions about his or her character?  When reading at home, encourage your child to share with you about the characters in his or her book!

Lastly in math, we continue our study of fractions.  This week we focused on placing fractions on a number line. After creating their own number lines from 0 to 1, the students practiced locating various points along the number line, including, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 2/3, and 5/6.  We then used these number lines and number line diagrams to help solve story problems involving fractions.  We also started a small Jack and the Beanstalk project in math.  This week we created paper beanstalks and measured the stalk and leaves to the nearest half- and quarter- inch.  We will use this data next week to construct line plots showing the length of the leaves.

Happy 100th Day!

It's hard to believe, but we have reached the 100th day of school! It's gone by so quickly!  We celebrated with a special trail mix made up of lots of "100s" of chocolate chips, cereal, pretzels, goldfish, etc.  Delicious!

This week we began reading Because of Winn Dixie as a mentor text for our new character study unit during Reader's Workshop.  We have been observing how the character "Opal" acts and talks and have been using our observations to come up with ideas about Opal and what they tell us about her. We have been working toward making our ideas precise and using text evidence to support our ideas. We have also been noticing character patterns, what the character does over and over, and using that information to come up with big ideas and theories about the characters.

We continue to work hard on our opinion pieces during Writer's Workshop and are learning how to create a presentation in Google Slides and will be using voice over to record our speeches.  When our speeches are done we will be sending links to our families through email so you can listen to our speeches at home.

During math we have been learning about fractions as fair share, and using our understanding of unit fractions to compare and order fractions. We have also been exploring pattern block fractions.  We have been working hard to use precise language when describing relationships between fractions and have been learning about the words "congruent" and "equivalent".

Next week will be filled with a variety of events for us.  Deb's class will visit the Book Fair on Monday to preview books and will return to the Book Fair on Tuesday to purchase books.  Her class will also be attending the Kindergarten Concert Tuesday morning, and will have Hands On Nature on Thursday. On Friday we will have our Valentine's Day Celebration.  Miss Niles' class will visit the Book Fair on Monday for our preview as well and then Tuesday is our purchase day.  We also will be attending the Kindergarten concert and will have Hands on Nature that day...busy!

Have a terrific weekend!