Happy Holidays!

The Firefly Team had a wonderful day filled with special snacks, beverages and a movie (Babe in the City). A huge thank you to Colleen Wemple, Christie Allen, Cecilia Halliburton, Erica Terriciano, and Melissa Whitaker for all the wonderful treats they sent in to make it a special day for us today.
A huge thank you to all my families for all the thoughtful gifts. I am overwhelmed by your generosity.
I hope everyone has a happy, healthy holiday vacation. See you in 2012!

Examples of Some of our Math Problems

Week of December 12th

This week in math we worked on solving several lobster problems trying to figure out how many were left, how many legs there were on a certain amount of lobsters, and trying to figure out how many lobsters with a given amount of legs. Then we made our own problem about lobsters. This was our third problem of the year that we have made in math and you could see the confidence growing in your children about doing these. On Wednesday they made the backgrounds and then on Thursday they planned out their problem on a white board and then conferred with me before drawing it out on their backgrounds. They were all able to come up with great problems on their own with little help from me. It was great to see. Next week the class will solve some of these problems.

In Science and Social Studies this week they continue to learn about Animals and Long Ago. In my classroom they learned about Colonial homes and about schools from long ago. They made Keeping room dioramas and then horn books. Next week we will look at Colonial time jobs. In Deb's room they talked about adaptations of animals.

In writing we are continuing with our Small Moment stories. We will be wrapping these up next week and then when we come back from our Holiday break we will look at Non-Fiction writing. We also learned about letter writing and each wrote a thank-you note to Tao for coming into our classroom last week.

On Tuesday we had a Special Visitor come to our classroom. Her name is Heather Baron and she is working with our school on Differentiated Instruction. She came to our team this week to teach the children one of the 16 Habits of Mind. We looked at the importance of questioning when learning. We talked about our visit from Tao last week and brainstormed questions that we might want to ask her using question starters such as I wonder why...., I wonder if...., I wonder how..... They came up with these in groups of 4 & 5 and then picked one burning question to share with the group. They came up with some very thought provoking questions about what Tao had shared. We will follow-up with this by asking Tao to answer some of these questions. Check out the pictures below.

Please remember that there is no school next Friday. Also there will be no homework next week since it is a short week.

Have a wonderful weekend,
Nancy

PTO FOOD BASKET COLLECTION

Every year the PTO sponsors a special collection of lunch, breakfast, snack and holiday meal foods for local families to enjoy during the holiday vacation break. We are always amazed by the generosity of our school community for this event, and we appreciate it very much. In the past we have asked every student to donate one of the assigned items and we have had plenty to go around. Due to the increase in need, please send in an extra item if you’re able to. In addition, if you are willing to donate laundry detergent, that can be dropped off at the main office. Thank you and enjoy the holiday season. Contact Jan Thabault at jthabault@cssu.org with any questions.

Our Team will be donating Boxed Snack Food (Granola Bars, Rice Krispie Treats etc.)

Making Dumplings

On Thursday night Mrs. KillKelley, Tao Ye and I made dumplings at Mrs. KillKelley's house. It was actually a lot of fun. We wish we had had enough time with Tao in the classroom so that we could have included the children in the process. If anyone is interested in how they are made please let me know. It's a lot of chopping of vegetables and then wrapping them in dumpling wraps, boiling and then frying. Today the children got to taste our creation. Then today Tao had a question and answer time with the whole team. They really enjoyed their time with her.

Have a Great weekend,
Nancy

Frying The Dumplings

Learning with Tao

Free picture slideshow personalized with Smilebox

Tao Ye, a visiting 27 year old Chinese teacher from Lijiang, China spent 3 days with our class this week. She taught the class how to say chinese numbers from 1-10 and also taught them how to write numbers up to 1,000. She also spoke to us about her hometown in China. Lijiang is located in the southeast part of China. It has an Old Town and a New Town. She talked about the Old Town which has 800 years of history. Some of the things she shared with us:
-people are protective of the Old Town
-there are 2 wheel wells at the entrance of the town (these are pictured in the slide show)
-there are lots of small rivers located throughout the Old Town
-Si Fang square is the center of the Old Town and at night visitors come and dance with the locals who dress up in costumes
-You can ski in the mountains but to access them you have to ride a Gondola and it's so high that some people need oxygen when they go to the top
-There are no cars allowed in the Old Town
-There are 3 wells located in the town and the 1st one is for drinking water, the second is to wash vegetables, and the third is to wash laundry (this is pictured in the slide show)
-January 23rd is the Chinese New Year and this year it is the Year of the Dragon

We enjoyed our time with Tao. She taught us a lot.