~ FALL BREAK FRIDAY ~

Hope the kids enjoyed the extra day off!

AROUND THE SCHOOL

October 27th - Fall Recess - No School
October 31st: Costume Parade and Dance for K-4th
November 1st & 2nd: Early Dismissal Day - 1:45pm
November 1st & 2nd: Parent Teacher Conferences
November 3rd: No School
November 22nd - 24th: Thanksgiving Break

Pictures from Red Ribbon Week

Enjoy some pictures capturing the children celebrating Red Ribbon Week.  Some groups enjoyed creating a pose too!

LANGUAGE ARTS

1st Grade: Silly Speak: Now that they are vowel experts, the students were ready to learn our new language: Pig Latin! This week I displayed a few words on the board:

"og-day" = dog

"ello-hay" = hello

"ooth-tay" = tooth

"ecret-say" = secret

I gave them a few minutes to try and figure out the rules to our language. They were able to decode secret! Then we used these words to walk through a handout explaining the rules. We practiced our new language using our own names. It was perfect practice, as we had names that started with vowels, consonants and consonant clusters.

They were ready to try it out on their own by completing a worksheet. We practiced the first one together. They did great with the consonant rule, but the vowel rule keeps tricking them. To end the day, they began to encode a sentence to Pig Latin. We will continue with our Pig Latin lesson next week

2nd Grade: The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane: We sat down and discussed our reading from the week. This allowed us to create a class story board. Then it was time to revise our predictions. The students looked back at their previous responses and revised their thoughts.

After reading the first 8 chapters, they had a much better idea about what to write about this time! This allowed them to add some details into their predictions. To end the week, we read chapter 9 together in class. While reading the chapter we were paying close attention to point of view. Point of View will lead our discussion next week.

HOMEWORK: The students are to read chapters 10-13. They do not have a reading analyzer to complete because of a longer reading assignment. This made them very excited!

3rd Grade: Beatrix Potter: We finished going over how to complete the analyzer. When completing the main idea our analyzer wants us to think of the theme in the story. We took a few minutes to look at our focus wall and highlighted the different themes posted.

They were encouraged to look over the wall if they were struggling finding the theme of a story. Now it was their turn to investigate more of Beatrix Potter's stories. After selecting partners, they chose from a small collection of her books in the room. While reading the story, they had to complete a reading analyzer. They will continue with this project next week.

4th Grade: Change Maker: This week the students continued to gather their resources. After finding their resources, they were allowed to use the class time to read about their person. By Tuesday, they needed to be able to answer how this person inspired change to society and how that change influenced them. This is the basis to the entire project and without these answers it would be recommended to choose another person. I am happy to say that they were able to answer the question and continue on with their chosen person.

MATH

1st Grade: Polygons: We started the week with another round of Grupo. They were much better at spotting pairs the 2nd time around. Our winning team got to choose a gift from the prize box! Then it was time to wrap up our lesson.

We looked at our Think Deeply question to see what it was asking us to answer. The students needed to create a match to one of two shapes given, following the rules of Grupo.

Then it was onto writing about the shapes: 4 ways they were alike and explain how they are different. We will finish with the writing to our question next week.

2nd Grade: Symmetry: Welcome Back 2nd Grade! This week we created our Triangle Designs. The students had to create certain shapes using two congruent triangles. Some shapes they created using only triangles were: a triangle, rectangle, square and a parallelogram.

The parallelogram was a knew shape for them, so we took a look at our word wall to define it. It was now time to wrap-up our lesson. We looked at our Think Deeply question and what Dru and Teller were needing help answering. This led us into a discussion reviewing what they remembered about symmetry.

The focus being that when drawing a line of symmetry, both sides of the shape will be a perfect match. Then the students completed their letter to Dru and Teller. They were asked to explain symmetry to our friends. We will begin a new lesson next week.

3rd Grade: More Patterns: This week we completed our Think Beyond cards from our first two lessons. A Think Beyond card has them solve problems based on the math concept from the lesson.

They add onto the concept and let us think further about it. We will work with Think Beyond cards after each lesson. We moved onto our new lesson by playing a Silent Game.

I wrote the start of a pattern on the board. Then I chose the first student to come and add onto the pattern. For the remainder of the game, the students would select the next person to fill in the pattern.

The catch - it had to be done with NO TALKING! After completing the pattern, the goal was to be able to explain the pattern to the function rule. We played 2 rounds of the silent game. We will continue to investigate patterns further next week

4th Grade: Fractions greater than 1: We moved onto our investigation phase! This week they drew for partners to mix-up our groups. Then they began to use the Frolicking Frogs Jump Contest to lead their investigation.

It was their job to continue creating fraction strips to replicate the jumps given and answer questions about them. Sometimes they were even a judge and had to determine the winner.

They needed a quick reminder that when the frogs jump in the contest it is 3 consecutive jumps in a row. This will help them as they complete the assignment. We will continue with this assignment next week.

Happy Halloween!

Ms. Losinski

~ FEELING LIKE FALL-FRIDAY ~

AROUND THE SCHOOL

October 20th: Report Cards Available Online
October 23rd-26th: Red Ribbon Week

October 24th: Picture Retake Day

October 27th - Fall Recess - No School
October 31st: Costume Parade and Dance for K-4th

RED RIBBON WEEK

Monday, October 23rd: Wear Read and sign your drug-free pledge
Tuesday, October 24th: Wear your Pajamas to show dreams are more important than drugs.
Wednesday, October 25th: Wear Red, White and Blue to show that your vote this year is to live a drug free life.
Thursday, October 26th: Wear Neon/bright colored clothing and sunglasses to show we are too "bright" to do drugs.

The National Family Partnership is sponsoring a Photo Contest. This contest is FREE, simple and you could win an IPad and $1000.00 for our school. Log onto www.redribbon.org and find out more!



LANGUAGE ARTS

1st Grade: Silly Speak: This week the students were introduced to our new message. We made a connection to our code by recognizing a telephone keypad. The message combined a letter and arrow to signal the letter it represented. Our secret message was: We can speak a secret language!


In order to learn our secret language, the students must be familiar with vowel sounds in words. We completed a worksheet on identifying the vowel sound in a word. This worksheet let us further our knowledge with vowels. Some things they were introduced to were:

• vowel sounds can be "sung"
• all words have at least one vowel sound
• the number of vowels we hear tells us the number of syllables to a word
• some vowels are silent - sneaky "e"
• the letter "y" can be a consonant or a vowel
• some words can begin with a vowel sound

Wow! That was a lot. Now they are ready to be introduced to our silly language - Pig Latin. We will continue learning our new language next week.

2nd Grade: The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane: I was happy to see that all the students returned their reading analyzers. For their first time completing them on their own, they did a great job! They had a few questions over the analyzer, so we took some time on Monday to review a few items. Our technology issues were fixed! This week they watched a video on prepositions and sang the preposition song.

Next,we finished our discussion on Chapter 4 while using Paul's Reasoning Wheel. They have developed a strong relationship to our characters: Abilene's connection to Edward and Edward's connection to himself.



We glanced back at some points where we saw Edward developing a feeling towards the stars, but he does not understand this feeling yet. We are going to pay attention to that note as we read on in our story. To end the week, we read chapter 5 together.
Homework: They are to read chapters 6-8. They are excited to read on because chapter 5 left us with lots of questions! They were also assigned a reading analyzer for chapter 8. Some students already finished their reading in class!

3rd Grade: Beatrix Potter: We took a few minutes to let the students share their homework. I was very pleased to see all the "pieces" to our hamburger in their writing. We briefly shared a reminder about how an interaction must be an exchange and not cause and effect. Before moving onto our next lesson, I displayed a chart for the students to see. It organizes authors, interactions and the stories they write.

This will help us organize our author studies throughout the year. We added our first author Paul Goble and discussed how his interactions with Native American led him to write stories about them. Then the students were introduced to our next author: Beatrix Potter. The students read her biography and highlighted any interactions that they identified.

They were already able to identify her love for animals. Then we read The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. After reading the story, we began to complete a reading analyzer together. A reading analyzer is a worksheet the students compete to help them develop a deeper meaning to their reading.

It helps them ask questions and leads them to think about what the selection was teaching the reader. Some students completed these last year, but this years is slightly different. We will fill the first one out together, so the students understand their expectations when completing them throughout the year. We will finish our analyzer next week.

4th Grade: The Change Maker: This week the students were introduced to their project - The Change Maker. We went through the direction and highlighted important requirements with each step. They were explained that they would receive plenty of class time, as we will work on this project through winter break. However, some work at home will be required throughout the unit. This week the focus was on selecting a person. After choosing 3 people, they needed to research them to make sure they understood the change the person contributed to society and how it has influenced them. This is the most important part of the whole project, without a firm understanding on the change they will struggle through the entire project. This is why we are taking the time to understand the change before we begin. For the rest of the week, they were allowed to read about their person of choice.

MATH

1st Grade: Grupo: We started the week by sorting our shapes from last week into categories based on the number of sides and how many shapes created it. This led us into an introduction of our new game: Grupo. First, we looked at our shapes to find matches with the playing cards. This made us familiar for looking for pairs by identifying a matching shape and the inside shapes it took to create it. This will help us when playing Grupo.

Next, we went over the rules to our new game: The object is to collect the most pairs. To make a pair the cards must have 4 things in common:

• same number of sides
• same number of vertices
• same shape name
• same number of inside shapes
• same kind of inside shapes

We spent the rest of class playing grupo.

2nd Grade: We did not meet this week because of a change in schedule for 2nd grade. Looking forward to finishing up our lesson next week!

3rd Grade: Think Deeply: I cannot believe it was already time for another Think Deeply Question! We started the week by reviewing our lesson. This took a little more time, as some students were still struggling with replacing our variable with a number.

We will continue to build onto functions throughout the year, so I want to make sure the students understand this concept. We reviewed the idea of finding a formula in a growing pattern. We also identified the pattern with the answers - which represents our growing pattern. For the rest of the time, the students responded to the Think Deeply question. This time they already solved for the answer in the investigation phase of our lesson, so the main objective was to explain the process.
We ended the day looking for the solution to the second Think Deeply question. The question remained the same of solving for 23 tables, but this time the tables were in triangles. Students quickly caught on to the solution, but to answer the question they needed to give me the function. As a class, we came up with the formula F=T+2. They all thought this one was much easier!

4th Grade: Making Sense of Fractions: This week we made a 3 ft long fraction strip. We took our representation of fraction strips further, by moving our focus to fractions greater than 1. Together we walked through creating 3 wholes on our fraction strip.

They immediately remember for thirds we use the "S" fold. However, we were trying to identify 1 and 1/3. This meant we needed to divide each whole section also into thirds. After creating our folds it was time to label each part. It was easy to label up to 3/3, but our first reaction was the next line became 1/3 again. This is where we introduced the term improper fraction. I explained they we were counting on from our 3/3 and immediately a student identified it as 4/3.
They easily finished labeling their strips to 9/3. We looked back at our first whole section and defined a proper fraction. We defined it as a fraction less than 1, meaning the numerator will be smaller than the denominator. We then switched our focus a mixed number. To end the day the students created another fraction strip. This time their goal was to label each fold as they found 2 and 3/4 and 5/4. We will continue working with fractions greater than 1 next week.

Enjoy the weekend!

Ms. Losinski