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.