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The Stroud Crowd Newsletter > January 22, 2006 What's New in Room 202? It’s nice to get back into a normal groove following the snow day interruptions! It has been a few weeks since my last newsletter update (we’ve been soooo busy) so I’ll make up for it here and fill you in on what we’ve been doing! The children have been very busy immersing themselves in our imaginary journey Storypath unit, Safari In Kenya. The children created photographers (the characters) who travel to Kenya to take photographs of the wildlife on the Maasai Mara Game Reserve. They’ve packed their “suitcases” and are on their way! Through this process, they are reading and learning about geography and about the animals who live in the reserve, as well as the native Maasai people. We created a mural of the reserve and the animals, which included researching the animals using the internet, library books, videos, encyclopedias, and animal fact files. Each student has selected an animal to research and has been busily gathering information in order to write a report. They used a thinking map (tree map) to organize their facts for the report. If you have any info to share on this topic, please send it in or let me know! Emily Lauderback (Hazel’s mom) will be coming in Friday to share scrapbook photos and stories from her Kenyan safari. In math, we wrapped up our graphing and data unit “Does it Walk, Crawl or Swim?” by collecting a lot of data about our class and writing statements about the graphs. You can still see some of our graphs and Venn Diagrams around the room. We continue to practice telling time. You can practice elapsed time with your child using real life scenarios (“The movie starts at 2:00 and ends at 4:00. How long is the movie? If you go to bed at 8:00 PM and wake up at 7:00 AM, how long did you sleep?”) We are just beginning our next TERC unit “Shapes, Halves and Symmetry.” In it, we will work on geometry and fractions. Using pattern blocks, tangram puzzles, and computer programs, we explored the structure of and relationship between shapes, discussed shapes around us, and found shapes within shapes in our classroom. The big idea in this unit is that shapes can be combined or decomposed to make other shapes. We sorted, described, and identified shapes by various attributes using shape cards. Classification and definition of shapes are important processes in geometry, and leads them to consider basic ideas about area and volume, and are closely linked with number (when they create rectangles with square tiles or create rectangular solids with cubes, they see how surfaces can be covered or space can be filled with many of the same unit). We have also published our Qwest Field Math Trail story problems on the internet. You can see them at www.mathtrails.org . In Science, we’re learning about soil and investigating the components of soil (sand, clay and humus). We observed them with the hand lenses and wrote about their properties, and we investigated what happens to sand, clay, and humus when they get wet. We tried rolling each into a ball and are watching what happens as the water evaporates and the balls (or not so bally balls) dry. We continue to have reading groups on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Students work on fluency building by doing reader’s theater and reading with expression, are doing guided reading in leveled just right books, do word work with the spelling words or dictionaries, read about Kenya and wild animals, and work on comprehension activities (we read about the 2 types of rhinos and did a Venn diagram to compare and contrast them). Other fun activities have rounded out our day, like reading to our Reading Buddies last week, learning about the music of Kenya and making drums with our wonderful music docent Aaron (Kaye’s dad), and practicing figure drawing / action poses with Jennifer P. (Wren’s mom). Each student got to strike a pose for the others to sketch, and today they practiced adding details to the sketches by drawing me as I was striking a cool pose with my latte! For many of the students, these drawing sessions are not only fun, but are also very good for building finger strength to help improve handwriting skills. We enjoyed going to the play “Annie” and watching the wonderful child actors perform. Congrats to Cecilia, McKenzie, Colby, and Kaye, our Check it Out winners the last couple weeks. Our Valentines Day party will be on Feb. 14 from 2:10-3:10. Don’t forget your cards! DONATIONS NEEDED: small post-it notes for graphing, baby wipes for clean ups What's the Buzz? The Buzz Group theme for Monday, Jan. 29 will be something you would take on a safari. Story Corners Practice your story. 2/1 10:30 Hayden, Levi, Paige, Dylan 2/9 3:00 Hazel, Kaye, Amy, Maci 2/16 3:00 Colby, Greer, Cecilia, Declan Reminders
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West Woodland Elementary School |