We are in the last few days of February and March has begun. The weather is starting to get nice, yay! Although we love the snow, we are getting outside in the sunshine more and really enjoying time with our friends! We have been working on those friendship skills during friendship workshop and it is amazing to see those skills in action! Our class read aloud is called Because of Mr. Terupt and we used the characters in that book to talk about different emotions and also learn about what boundaries are. We studied climate and are collaboratively planning projects for extreme weather. We took a visit to the science museum, which correlated with our extreme weather studies and was so much fun. We are learning all about multiplication, area/perimeter, moving our way towards division. As a class we took part in delivering letters through our school mail system. As a school we went to hear the RPO play in Rochester. Both were really cool experiences. We celebrated valentines day with a little party too! I can't believe we only have 4 months of learning left to go this year!
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November and December is done and gone. We have practiced and learned so many things! We started and completed the Addition and subtraction math unit. Students now have lots of strategies to solve adding and subtracting problems. I love that I get to teach cursive during ELA and we tie it into our phonics practice as much as possible. I think they know about 12 cursive letters by now. When they leave me to go to the VIS I want to make sure they have an understanding of what makes a good paragraph, so we have been practicing paragraph writing during our writing time. Around Thanksgiving we did some Stem projects to disguise our turkeys and engineer a boat to help them escape. In science we started delving into extreme weather, particularly floods, blizzards, tornados, and hurricanes. We even get to switch classes during this unit and that is so much fun! We are doing research to hopefully produce a final project in January/February. During these 2 months our student teacher from SJFU came and went. We did flashlight reading with our K3 buddies, which was such a fun way to read together. The high schoolers came to visit and we practiced coding for the "hour of code." We ended the month with Christmas grinch celebrations where we decorated cookies, made ornaments, watched the old school cartoon grinch, and talked about all the things that story can teach us. And of course to top it all off its that time of year that we finally got outside to play in the snow! Enjoy the pictures of all our fun below! I am so excited for a new year, it will be our best one yet! We got to know each other and how we could support each other as a classroom family. We discussed what a system is and how that works in both a circuit and in our brains. We had our first buddy meeting and our multiage playdate. We met a neuroscientist and learned all about how the library works. We had open house and learned about clouds. We dug into place value and what makes a good sentence. We even carved a pumpkin! We got off to such a great start I know the rest of the year will go so smoothly! May and June are packed full at the primary school! We were busy with spark sphero coding, a field trip to mendon ponds park, school wide reading day, our immigration unit, statue of liberty science, time around the world, k3 buddies making posters to support our special olympians, Lennox visits, learning about graphs, morning creations with friends, wee deliver post office, indoor field day, k1 play, author visit thanks to Lydia, finishing the cursive alphabet, and a VIS tour. Then we come to the last day where our hearts are full and our room becomes empty again. It was a great year!!
This was a short month, having a week of break in there, but we managed to finish our fraction unit right at the end of it. We covered concepts of measurement, fractions on a number line, and ordering and comparing fractions. We are such pros at it now! We started planning and organizing our community service book drive and enjoyed the uplifting (and loud) Jared Campbell performance. It was also so fun to get together with our K-3 buddies to finish our Reading Madness bracket, and our final book won! If you haven't read Love and Roast Chicken, go check it out below! We are starting to plan for the end of the year now... can't believe we only have 2 months left! After learning about the deciduous forest we delved into ecosystems and wolves. Did you know that if you take the wolf out of the ecosystem it all falls apart?! We even wrote an opinion piece about our thoughts of reintroducing wolves into NYS. We started a new math unit with a fraction discovery, and practiced skills like equivalent fractions and comparing fractions with like and unlike denominators. We also had some fun making creative creations during morning/recess, playing in the snow, enjoying morning meeting activities, and crafting valentines bags, When we finished up the forest study, we moved on to geography and maps. We even started marking our cultural stories on our maps as we read them. We started our reading madness bracket which was a fun little competition and learned about central message and traditional literature. We enjoyed a class read of Chocolate Fever where we studied the fictional story arc and wrote summaries about what we read. We really hit a groove in our learning and gained so much knowledge over these 2 months! Not a lot of snow this January, but definitely a lot of learning! We have continued with spelling and reading practice to improve our skills. Enjoyed a lot of cooperative play in the morning and during recess where we practice our social skills. During theme time we studied wolves and their part in pur ecosyatem, including reading traditiinal literature, researching their adaptations, and studying fossils to determine if we would want to reintroduce wolves to our area. The kids also wrote opinion pieces about the wolves. Somewhere in there we experianced a fire drill and evacuation which the kids handled so well. We alao spent rime with our buddies, making poaters and marching in the mlk day peace parade. The whole school joined us, which was prwtty neat. So much learning has happened in the first trimester! We have covered the theme topic deciduous forest which includes parts of a plant, habitats, seed dispersal, food chains, and owl pellet discovery. We have shared our learning with our Tanzania pen pals using flipgrid, learned addition and subtraction in math, done cursive and spelling practice, watched inquiry puppet shows, had fun with our K-3 buddies, played with friends in the snow, learned about each others traditions, and created our own Macy's Thanksgiving day parade and Rockefeller Christmas tree! The kids have worked hard and built some great friendships. We have plenty more to come!
September and October has come and gone. We have spent lots of time getting to know each other and also learning about our selves. They are such a great group of kids and we have slid into a routine rather quickly. We have done many teamwork challenges, learned about bus safety, practiced place value in math and learned new spelling games to practice our words. We got to meet our K-3 buddies, have some visitors and invited parents to come visit too. I can tell we are going to have a great year together!
End of the 2021-2022 school year! We had a great year and learned a lot. We wrapped up the rainforest, went on a field trip, enjoyed some performances and field days, and then finished the year with ice cream! Oh what a year!! |