~ BUCKET FILLER FRIDAY ~
I am happy to say most of my friends were able to answer our weekly quote for the week. Some classes even told me I was being too easy. I have a lot of friends excited to pick from the treasure box next week! We continued our focus this week on spreading our kindness throughout the world. As a class, we completed a kindness project by writing a way that we can spread our sunshine throughout the world. We have a few more finishing touches to put on the project and then I will share a picture with you next week. 
We have finished our month of Frozen. Check back next week to see a photo of our winning class. The classes worked hard this month and we had a 3-way tie for second place! Our new movie for the month of February will be Brave.
Around the School: Hannah’s Hope Pop Tab Wars continues through February 3rd. Please continue to save and send in your Pop Tabs. We are working toward a District goal to collect 3 million Pop Tabs.. As we work towards this goal, we are competing against the other schools. We appreciate you any help you can give us in this effort THANKS!
IMPORTANT DATES
February 1st: Early Dismissal Day
February 3rd: NFL Day - wear your team gear for the Superbowl
February 14th: Valentine Day Parties
February 17th -20th: Mid Winter Break
February 21st: Class Resumes
LANGUAGE ARTS
1st Grade: Leaving Letters Out - Lipograms: This week we started out by discussing our decoded message…”The letter E is used most often when we write!” We had a discussion as to what this meant and this led us into our new term - Lipogram - when we break the word apart we learned it means “lacking letters” A lipogram is a piece of writing where a letter (or letters) is purposely left out. This definition furthered our discovery into lipograms because they decided the letter is very common or popular in our writing. To end the day, they were given a list of words they needed to replace with a synonym without the letter “e” in it. This was a big challenge and they discovered first hand just how popular the letter “e” is to them.
On Tuesday, it was time to make a class lipogram. I asked them if they could think of a poem that used the words: went, the, fetch, water, fell down, broke, and came tumbling down…They were successful in guessing the nursery rhyme Jack and Jill! Together we used our list of words and created a lipogram with this poem. After we completed our poem - we of course had to recite it! Then the children watched a 1 minute preview the the book E-Mergency. We will read this book next week, but first we took the time to explore a chart showing us just how popular our letters in the alphabet are in writing.
2nd Grade: Metaphor - Connections Between Words and Meaning: We used Monday as a discussion day to our chapters assigned over the weekend. We finished discussing chapter 19 & 20 and worked our way through 22. We had some BIG events occur in our story during these chapters. We took plenty of time to discuss the feelings occurring through these chapters and the students did a good job handling the discussion. 
I reread part of chapter 22 to them while they were asked to look at only the front cover of our story. We realized this chapter describes the event taking place on the cover - this explains why some of their predictions thought Edward was a “real” rabbit in our story. It was a great time to refer to our predictions because we will revisit those next week.
On Tuesday, we paused from the book to look at metaphors with our story. We read an excerpt from the Testing Tree as a class. Then I asked the students to turn to the beginning of the book where they were surprised to see our author Kate DiCamillo started The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane with this poem. We paused for a moment to reflect on why she might have included this excerpt from the Testing Tree...a student shared with the class that it might have represented Edwards Journey. This was a great response - we took it further by deciding it could be a metaphor for Edward’s journey. This led us into our assignment for the day - we looked at two more poems as a warm-up and discussed the metaphor within the poems. Then they took lines from poems and had to fill in what they thought the line meant and how it was related to Edward’s Journey. We ran out of time, - so I asked them to pick 2 more metaphors and to finish them at home - returning on Monday.
3rd Grade: Fairy Tales: They completed their chart and then we compared and contrasted our different stories and their elements. This led us back to our class definition on Fairy Tales. I asked each student to take a moment and write their own definition in their notebook. I was happy to see them complete this with ease. They made sure to include all of the elements we were discussing and that it was fiction. As a class, we discussed the importance of including them in as folklore and what that tells us by adding it into our definition.
They had a choice between creating a treasure map of the story or drawing a new setting and reflecting on how it would change the story. Both chose to change the setting. They started this in class, but were asked to finish their reflections at home. If they complete this assignment we will play Kahoot next week as a wrap-up to Fairy Tales.
4th Grade: Change Makers: They are working hard on their biography reports. We are entering the final stretch with our reports. This week everyone has been working hard to complete their timelines. Everyone will have about 5 minutes to add finishing touches to them next week and then they have all completed this step. They did a great job and they look very nice! I will share final timelines with you next week.
This week they should be working on their monologue. They will have Monday and Tuesday to work on it in class. This will be there speech they will give on their person. They should walk us through the story of their chosen person making sure to focus on the change they contributed to society. After they complete this step, it is the final stretch of preparing their presentations on Prezi. They will receive a tutorial on Prezi before working on this step.
MATH
1st Grade: That Covers It - The Undercover Booths: We added onto our lesson this week by looking at the area of three different shapes. This brought us back to our word Transitivity from our weight unit. We looked at two shapes and had to predict before measuring which was smaller and larger. Then they checked their predictions. 
It was great seeing the students still making squares while making their predictions to make their educated guess. I was happy to see that most of my friends remembered to label their unit of measurement when completing this activity. They added onto our assignment this week - asking us to create a third shape being smaller or larger than our other shapes. 
Now we had to take our three shapes and place them in order from smallest to largest. This is the first time we were introduced to these words for our unit. I reminded them that just like with heaviest and lightest - when comparing 3 or more objects we will see -est added onto our word. We our hoping to finish this lesson next week.
2nd Grade: Length - Car Seats for Egg Passengers: We had a very busy week! It was onto round 2 and 3 this week - the CRASH! Each group made it through round 1 safely. Now it was onto round 2. During round 2 we had 2 groups whose egg safely stayed in their car seats. Then it was onto Round 3 - modifications if your car seat needed any. 
This time we had 2 car seats safely pass this round - although we noted that the car seat flipped over - the egg remained attached in the car seat.
On Thursday, we took all of are material and made a chart evaluating the car seats. We briefly looked back at our 5 star ranking chart from a previous lesson to understand scoring of the data. Then it was onto a GREAT class discussion. We evaluated our test results on the “Quality” - passing quality control, “Ease of Use” - our instructions, “Everyday Travel” - Round 1, and “Safety” - Round 2 and 3.
We went through each test we ran and marked our data on our class chart. We had car seats ranging from 2.5 stars to a PERFECT 5 star rating! We talked about the ways to continue our safety test most people thought about lifting our ramp. Unfortunately, we cannot raise our ramp. We had two other great ideas of giving the car a push to increase the speed or removing the padding. As a little motivation for next week if we complete all our work - then they can try a Round 4 increasing the speed!
~ Enjoy some videos from Round 2 ~
We also went through different ways perimeter could be stated in a story problem verse area. We worked through a few different worksheets to have some added practice on perimeter.
On Thursday, all of the students took our chapter check-up. I told the students to make sure they draw pictures to help them with the problems before trying to solve them. The check-up went much better today. I am glad we were able to go back and clear up and misunderstandings they had before moving onto our next chapter. This is the exact reason why we have this as a tool and it can in hand with this unit. Next week we will start our new chapter.
4th Grade: Do You See What I See: On Wednesday, they earned a day of fun after working so hard on their chapter check-up. I was super proud of how they took their time and worked so hard. They had a choice of Kahoot or set - Surprise they chose Kahoot! This time our rounds were on polygons, their names and attributes. This was the one area from the test that needed a little extra practice - so it worked as a perfect reminder!
On Thursday, we started our new chapter. Our new math concept we are focusing on - Transformation. Today we were introduced to translation and rotation. While we were working on defining translation, we learned the importance of using correct positional words when making a movement of a shape. They also learned to establish a starting point as they had to have me move to a star on a coordinate plane. If they weren’t specific with their movement using these terms I would not be able to find the star.
"Slide over 2 spaces," - they assumed I would go to the right - to show the importance of positional terms - I would move to the left. We started to define translation as a slide of a shape. Next we were onto rotation. We talked about the importance of the line of reflection. The students must identify to a person if the line is vertical or horizontal. We discussed a reflection as looking in a mirror. We flipped the shape over our line of reflection. We will continue working with rotation next week.
