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.