Week of January 16th

We have officially begun our penguin unit. We made penguin folders to keep all of our information. We charted a list of what we know about penguins and what we wonder. We read a poem about Antarctica and talked about it. We learned that Antarctica is over 9,000 miles from us. We made passports for our journey and recorded our weight and height which we will use later to compare to the various penguins we studied. We also played a game called "Journey to Antarctica" where each person had $100 to spend and the goal was to have the most money left over at the end of the game as they journeyed through. Next week we will begin talking about our first type of penguins the Rockhopper.

In Writing we have continued with our specialist books and are also working on a Non-fiction features book. This week we talked about what a Table of Contents was, photos, captions and diagrams and also their purposes. We will continue with the Non-fiction features book next week and also start gathering information to write a class report.

Discovery Table

This week started off with Nathan in our class sharing his Discovery table on apples. He had a wonderful display and brought in several kinds of different apples and labeled them with their type. He also had a video on the computer that students could look at the explained the decaying process of apples. The classes really enjoyed this. We got to end our week with him and his mom and we got to taste test 4 different types of apples. They were red delicious apples, golden delicious, pinata (a new type that I had never heard of) and brae burn. The second grade joined us and then they all voted on their 2 favorites. Red delicious received 18 votes, golden delicious 16 votes, brae burn 18 votes and the top choice was the pinata with 24 votes. It was a wonderful experience for everyone.

Check out the photos from the presentation and taste test:

Lida and HON Photos

This free scrapbook created with Smilebox

Week of January 9th

This week we have a new edition to our classroom. Ali Greenberg is a student teacher from UVM and she will be in our classroom until May 4th. She has already developed some great relationships with your children. She will work alongside me and help out with all instruction and eventually build up to being in charge and teaching all subject areas for 2 weeks in April. We are excited to have her in our classroom. She will be a great asset. There is an introductory letter from her in your child's Friday folder this week.

On Tuesday we had our visitor from the Flynn. Lida Winfield came in and helped the students create a dance involving making different shapes with their bodies and then as a whole class group. It was a lot of fun and the students enjoyed working with her. Check out our slide show of pictures.

We also had Hands on Nature this week. The topic was on Bird Migration. Students learned from the puppet show, musical chairs, and a migration game. I'd like to thank Cecilia, Lynn, Colleen, and Caitlin for coming in and teaching us about bird migration. The students learned a lot. Please ask them to tell you about it.

Next week we start our big Penguin unit. I've heard so much about this unit in the past that I am excited to have first hand experience teaching it. This is an integrated unit in math where we will be studying different kinds of penguins, writing reports, making passports, learning about measurement (different forms and what a unit of measure is), estimation, comparing and contrasting, and determining importance. We will invite families in to our classroom at the end to show off everything we did and learned.

In writing we learned what a specialist is and students have begun writing specialist books on a topic they know a lot about. I found out that we have a lot of bakers and cooks, animal lovers, and wii players. They are doing a fantastic job on their books.

Week of Jan. 4th

Welcome Back Everyone!! I hope everyone had a wonderful and restful break. It was a very short week especially for me. Unfortunately I was unable to be here most of the week as my father had to have surgery and I had to help with the transportation of getting him there and home. All went well though!

This week was Miles last week with us. He will be going to a new school next week. We are sorry to see him leave and will miss. We wish him all the best at his new school! All of your children brought home Angry bird erasers which were a gift from Miles. We also had a cake to celebrate his last day.

Next week we will have a special guest from the Flynn. She will be coming to do movement exercises with the class on the topic of shapes. She will work with the children on their knowledge of shapes and work movement into that knowledge. It should be a wonderful experience for them.

Next week we also have Hands on Nature. We will be learning about Bird Migration and the parents have some fun activities planned for us.

We are almost finished with Unit 3 in math. We should be wrapping it up next week and then we will begin our Unit on Penguins. This should be a wonderful unit and we will be doing lots of research as well as math with this unit and learning how to write reports about penguins. Stay tuned.....

Have a wonderful weekend,
Nancy