~ THUNDEROUS THURSDAY ~
Welcome Back!
I hope everyone had a restful spring break! Although I was on a stay-cation for spring break, I shared with all my students my family's newest member...we got a Puppy! Below, I will share with all of you our new member. Her name is Pixie - of course it had to be a Disney themed name! Although it seems the end of the school year is fast approaching, my groups still have many exciting projects we are completing.
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| ~ Meet Pixie - Our Newest Family Member ~ |
Second Grade CogAT Packets:
A pink
packet will go home this week. It will include the
CogAT screener results for every second grader. Those who qualified to
take the full, their results are also attached. More information about
the test and results can be found here. Using your child's results, paired with Duneland's High Ability website,
you can see how well your child did. No worries if they did not do
well on CogAT. It shows their ability to make connections and is
nothing taught in school. At this time, we are not officially informing
parents of those who qualified for HA. We will save that for after we
get their end of the year NWEA results. Remember: they need to only
qualify through one path. (CogAT or NWEA) Not both! Please stress to
your child to take their time and do their personal best on their next
NWEA as these scores are used to qualify for HA. Thanks!
IMPORTANT DATES
April 11th: PTO Meeting at 6:30pm
April 13th: Spelling Bee/Book Bowl
April 17th - April 28th: ISTEP Testing Window
May 1st - May 5th: Teacher Appreciation Week
May 3rd: Early Dismissal Day - 1:45pm
May 12: Yost Fest
May 19th: No School - Reserved Snow Day
May 29th: No School - Memorial Day
May 31st: Last Day of School & End of 4th Grading Period
LANGUAGE ARTS
KINDERGARTEN: Get-to-Know-You: This week was a simple introduction week for the students. We had a meet the teacher day - where they learned all about me. Followed by a meet the student day, where I learned all about them. We also went over the expectations and procedures of the classroom.
Next week - we will be diving into our lessons!
1ST GRADE: POETRY, PUNCTUATION, & FRIENDLY CONNECTIONS: We started out with a mini- writing lesson all about their spring break. They were allowed to share their stories with their classmates. Then it was back to work! We completed a connections worksheet today in class. They wrote and illustrated a sentence with a connection they have with a friend. Then they circled the way they have the connection: intellectual, social, physical or emotional.
The last part of the worksheet was to identify if it would change overtime and explain this answer. This was a struggle for some of them. To help them better understand this question, I would ask them in 10 years would we still have the same interests. This was a big help for them to understand if it would stay the same or change.
This was a great activity to bring us back to our definition of a connection and walk us through the 3 ways we can connect.
Due to Early Dismissal, we did not meet on Tuesday.
2ND Grade: THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX: On Monday, we took time out to share about our spring break adventures. First, they wrote a paper explaining as much as they could about their week. Before they began, I explained to them step 2 would be them being an active listener to the stories from their classmates while we play spring break bingo. This gave them a better understanding of some details to include in our writing. We had a 3-way tie for bingo and they will choose from the prize box next week.
On Tuesday, it was back to our novel. For the first 10 minutes I read to them chapters 14 & 15. This completed Book the First for us. Then they finished their packet over this section. This led us to a few key points to remember from this part of the book. We reviewed the two characters who betrayed Despereaux - his father and brother. We discussed if he was “strange” just because he was different. They needed help with the word conform, but after they defined it - this helped us summarize the entire first section - Despereaux would not conform as a mouse leading him to the situation he is in now.
Over the week they are to read chapters 16-18. This will begin Book the 2nd for them, which we will work with next week.
3RD GRADE: THE PIED PIPER OF HAMELIN - GRAMMAR: On, Monday we began by writing about our Spring Break and then sharing our stories. Then we selected a poem from Shel Silverstein. We discussed what we learn from reciting poetry - we better our fluency and our expression. I had them read it once through without rehearsing. This was to give them a comparison after they rehearsed it. For the remainder of class, they were allowed to practice reciting their poems.
On Tuesday, they quickly read over their poems and then shared them out loud. We watched our videos to see if we achieved our goal - which we decided they did a pretty good job! Then it was onto grammar. This week we were looking how the verb changes with a singular or plural noun - Subject-Verb Agreement. To introduce this, we looked back at stanza 2 from The Pied Piper of Hamelin. We identified the topic of this stanza would be the rats. Then we composed a list of the verbs. We changed them all from past tense to present. This gave us our subject-verb agreement for our plural noun. Now onto the question - how do we change the verb if the subject is singular? We went through the list changing each one.
Now it was their turn - they came up with a list of 10 singular nouns. Then they added a verb with each noun. We will finish completing this part when we return next week.
4TH GRADE: IT’S A MYSTERY: On Monday, we completed a bingo activity of what we did on our Spring Break. They went around the room interviewing each student - to see if they completed any of the items on their list. We shared who completed what spring break task - allowing them to share a story with it if they wanted too.
On Tuesday, we looked at our story we will be working with for the next few weeks. We want to explore another mystery before moving onto writing our own. As a class, we are listening to the story File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents by Lemony Snicket. As we work through the book, their job is to be the detective.
We will listen to some of the short stories and they need to compile a list of clues that help them hopefully solve each case. When we complete this activity, we will see who was our Top Detective and they may select a prize from our treasure box.
MATH
KINDERGARTEN: WELCOME WEEK: Welcome! Due to tech week, we did not meet on Wednesday. 
On Tuesday, we started with an introductory video to High Ability. Going over our class expectations and procedures. Then I shared a little about myself to the group. Next, it was onto a quick activity - where it was now all about them!
1ST GRADE: POM-POM TOSS GAME: All of our preparation of working with Imi and Zani, has prepared us for our final task - The Pom-Pom Toss Game. We quickly made some new target designs for our game. Then, I demonstrated how we will play the game. We started with round 1, where we played four rounds (using each of the targets we made) from 2 feet apart.
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| Round 2 -Winner |
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| Round 1-Winner |
You accumulate points when you figure out the distance from the target your pom-pom landed in inches. The person with the lowest score wins!
On Thursday, we continued playing our game this time from 4 feet away. Today, we had some friends have perfect tosses - more than once! Look below at some of our fun from our game this week. We will wrap-up this lesson next week, by adding onto the Pom-Pom Toss game. |
| Bulls-eye |
2ND GRADE: MEERKAT DEN: On Monday, we discovered that Dru and Teller need our help once again. They need to find a way to make a larger den for the new babies that joined them. We quickly reviewed what we previously learned about area. Then they were introduced to the square inch tile - which we will switch to using for this lesson.
On Tuesday, it was all about Transitivity! We reviewed the definition of what transitivity means. Then they practiced this skill on a worksheet. Organizing a set of 3 rectangles from smallest to largest without using any measuring tools. First, they predicted by just looking at the shapes.
Then they were allowed to move the shapes around to come up with a better guess of the order. To end the day, we began to check our measurements with our square-inch tiles. We will continue to work with area next week.
3RD GRADE: CHAPTER CHECK-UP: On Wednesday, it was time for our Chapter Check-up for Chapter 2. I will use the information collected from this to see if we need to review any materials before moving onto our last math concept for the year.
On Thursday, we started our final chapter! It will be all about Capacity. We looked back at our Hunt for the Capacity worksheet they completed from the beginning of the year. Going over this material introduced us to capacity. We identified the different units of measurement we will be working with while studying capacity.
As a class, we looked at a list of measurement terms with terms from the past and now. They found some of these names very silly! They started to look at their worksheet to identify totals. We will continue working with capacity next week.
4TH GRADE: Can you believe it - we are onto our last section in our math books! We were introduced to reflecting a shape on dot paper. We took this further, by describing the reflection and comparing the original shape to the new one. We were able to conclude that each vertex stays the same distance apart from the line of reflection it just moves in the opposite direction from it - up, down, left or right.
Then we began to investigate it further. On dot paper, we drew a shape and then we translated it. This time with 2 shifts. We moved it up and to the right, adding on from our introduction of only one shift. Now they tried one on their own. Then we switched from dot paper to a grid while we completed Positively Yours. This time we graphed an original shape and then they were give a translation to find and plot the new coordinates.
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