Screen Free Week

Next week will be our next 'screen free week' at Shenandoah. Coming home tomorrow will be the forms to fill out with how many hours the children have been screen free each evening. Students can bring in the slips each day. Any class that logs 100 hours or more will earn an extra recess! There is also a sheet coming home with ideas for activities. Additionally, if you want to snap a photo of your child participating in a non-technology activity you can send it in to go up on a bulletin board at school! Please let me know if you have any questions.

Reading Goal

Our class's reading goal for the month of April is 7,040 minutes. The grade level goal is 21,440! Let's see if we can reach it!

Get Moving!

Brain breaks are an important part

of our day! Research tells us that little bodies and brains need frequent movement to learn best. Here we are doing a Gonoodle brain break together this morning. 

Location!

This week we begin our next Social Studies unit - Location! Location! Location! Which is about maps and map skills. During this unit Students will work on their geographic skills as they use maps and globes to locate a place and describe its relative location to the United States. Students will be introduced to the compass rose and cardinal directions to assist them in locating and describing the location of places on the map. The students will be able to locate the seven continents and five oceans. We will be exploring a variety of different maps and learning how to read them. Students will also construct their own maps.

Reader's Theater

We have been working hard on our character study unit. During this unit we have learned how to identify character traits, emotions, actions, and motivations. Students have participated in a number of activities drawing comparisons between themselves and characters and also among characters.

Now we are taking our understanding of characters to the next level by BECOMING one! Students began working on reader's theater stories this week. During this activity students will work in groups to perform their stories. This is a great way for students to apply what they have learned during the character unit as they think about how these characters might act, talk, etc. It's also a great application for working on the FLUENCY piece of writing which students have been working and building on all school year.

In addition to demonstrating students' understanding of characters and reading fluency, it's a chance for students to practice their listening and speaking skills. Students will need to listen and pay attention to their friends' lines and be ready for their own. They will need to project their voices appropriately for their audience. Audience members will need to practice their listening skills, too!

We will be pulling in what we have learned from our story elements unit as well as we think about the setting, problem, and solution for our stories.

What a fun way for us to practice and demonstrate our ability as readers!

Extending Numbers and Operations

We are working in our extending numbers and operations unit. In this unit students extend their understanding from Unit 1 and 2, to a larger number range. Students apply the structure of teen numbers to work with larger quantities. Providing authentic context for students to develop appropriate strategies to reason about and solve addition and subtraction problems is important. We are playing a variety of games to reinforce these skills and continue practice with numbers beyond 20. In this unit students apply their conceptual understanding of addition, subtraction, and comparison to interpret and write expressions and equations.

Students are working on :
-Adding a 2 digit number to a 1 digit number within 100
-Adding a 2 digit number and a multiple of 10 within 100
-Mentally finding 10 more or 10 less than a 2 digit number
-Subtracting a multiple of 10 from a multiple of 10
-Representing and solving (more complex) word problems involving addition and subtraction

We also continue to work on identifying coins and their values and adding coins. Many students are still struggling to transfer these skills into activities, so more help at home with real coins will help reinforce this.

Some other items you can continue to work on at home:
-math facts up to 20
-practice telling time to the half hour and the hour
-a variety of story problems (watch work coming home for an idea what we are working on)

Writing How-To's

Students completed their "All About" versions of expert books with great success! We learned about a variety of topics from each other and even got to share with a kindergarten class. The students enjoyed applying what they had learned from our non-fiction reading unit by adding appropriate text features.

We have been working on "How to" expert books. Students have carefully planned and prepared for their how-to books. Students are using transition words and careful sequencing to teach their reader about a process. Students are publishing these books this week.

Beginning next week we will start our next non-fiction writing unit. During this unit, students will be working in the classroom and in the library on a research project. Students will be collaborating with a partner to research a topic (this will bring in reading skills we have been working on all year such as reading for meaning and pulling out information) and then use the information gathered to prepare a presentation using Google Slides (think Power Point). Students will be learning to take notes and write a presentation using their own words on a topic.

Once the presentations are complete, I will share links with you so you may view the finished products!

Word Work - This Week

The spelling pattern we are working on this week is: gl-   pl-   sl-

The accountable word for the week is: was

Welcome back!

I hope you all had a nice spring break! We sure did! 

Science fun!

Today students are using an equal arm balance to weigh different objects. Students will discover what what an object is made of us going to affect its weight more than the size. Just because something is larger does not mean it will be heavier. Students are finding out how many cubes each object weighs. 

Coins

Part of our current math unit introduces coins: pennies, nickles, dimes, and quarters. While most of the unit is about adding larger numbers together, we will spend some time working on coin skills as well. Any practice you can do at home with identifying and adding coins would be helpful.

Word Work

This week we are working on the blends:  bl-    cl-   fl-
The accountable word is : yes

Balance and Weighing

We started a new science unit this week - balance and weighing. The essential questions we are working with during this unit are: How does weight affect balance? Are bigger things always heavier? How can using a balance help place objects in order? During this unit students will work with a beam balance and an equal arm balance. They will place objects in serial order (from lightest to heaviest). The will use the balances to measure and compare the mass of objects (more/less). They will compare measurements. 

Class Party

Hello!

Our Spring Party is a couple short weeks away. It will be on March 17th at 2:55pm. If you would like to help with set-up, please arrive by 2:40pm so that you can be allowed back to our room.

The theme will be a Hawaiian Luau. Feel free to wear a Hawaiian shirt or lei. Here are the acitivities:

- We will start with a scavenger hunt for leis and candy. Leis and candy will be hid around the room.

- The snack will be snow cones from Kona Ice. While kids wait for their turn to get a snow cone or wait for others to finish their snow cones, they will color a picture for “Color a Smile”, an organization that distributes cheerful drawings to older adults and troops overseas. Depending on timing, they may do the craft as well.

- Then, we will split the class up into 3 groups for games:

- Limbo: Limbo to the tune of “Limbo Rock

- Hoola: Hold hands in a circle and pass a hoola hoop around the circle without letting go of each other’s hand

- Pass the Beach Ball: Play hot potato with a beach ball to the tune of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Whoever has the beach ball when the music stops, picks a question out of a cup to answer.

- Craft: Make a Flower with Pipe Cleaners and Tissue Paper (May be done during snow cone time if snow cones are taking a while to be served)

See you then!

Valerie

Expert Books

We are hard at work creating "expert" books (non-fiction). The essential questions for this unit are:
-Why do people compose expert books?
-How do people organize books so others can learn about topics?

We began with a graphic organizer to help students generate topics about which to write. They are experts on a variety of topics! Next, the students learned how to create a web to pre-write. After the web was created, they developed a table of contents in order to organize their writing. This week we have been discussing various text features they can include in their books. Students are able to apply some of what they learned during our past reading non-fiction unit as they create their own books! Students are effectively adding features such as: diagrams, captions, headings, and more to enhance their books.

Reminder - Pajama Day

This is a reminder that the school-wide pajama day is this coming Friday. If students bring slippers to wear, please make sure they have tennis shoes for recess and PE.

Have to share...

You all share your children with me, so now it's my turn. My baby turned one Tuesday! 

Coin Challenge

Each month a student is chosen and honored from each grade level for demonstrating exemplary panther pride. This month Anish from our class received the award! Way to go Anish!