TUESDAY, TUESDAY

~ THANKSGIVING BREAK ~

I would like to take a moment wish all of you a 
 Happy Thanksgiving!  This is one of my favorite times of the year.  I enjoy cooking the Thanksgiving Feast and being surrounded by family. To us, this week seems to kickoff the Holiday Season.  It is the start to many of our traditions and seeing the joy in my children's eyes makes this Time of Year - Magical!

Below is a picture of our Leaves of Thanks Project!

AROUND THE SCHOOL

November 22nd - 24th: Thanksgiving Break

December 7th: Early Dismissal Day at 1:45
December 8th: Winter Fest 5:00 to 7:30

December 22nd: End of 2nd Quarter

December 25th - January 7th: Winter Recess

Last week of November - 4th grade CSI test (used as one piece of the data (along with end of year NWEA) for HA identification in fifth grade, please stress that your fourth grader take their time and do their personal best on this test)

LANGUAGE ARTS

1st Grade:  Connecting Letters and Language:  We completed a worksheet together that introduces the idea of word ladders.  We briefly discussed how the meaning to a word can completely change just by switching one letter: cat to cap or smart to start.  

 Then it was onto our secret message.  It was time to decode The Over Under Cipher.  The title of the cipher served as their hint to solve it.  I was super excited to see that they were all able to decode our secret message on their own!  



 Our secret message was:  Hip hip hooray for the alphabet!  We discussed why someone would be excited for the alphabet. They are happy we have the alphabet so that we can read.  They also told me the sounds the letters make allow us to speak words too. 


 Next, we listened to The Disappearing Alphabet by Richard Wilbur.  They predicted our story would be about our alphabet disappearing.  We had a silly discussion on how it would be to hard to elimanate any one letter from the alphabet.  However, they were quick to eliminate the letter "Z"!  Even after I mentioned we would have no Zoos without this letter.  We will continue on with our lesson after break.  



2nd Grade:  The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane:   We started class out by labeling a sentence.  They spotted the preposition without their list, but needed a reminder on marking the prepositional phrase.  Then, it was onto discussing our book. 

 
We had lots to share!  In just a few chapters, Malone became Clyde and Clyde became Jangles!  There is a lot going on at this point in our story and they were excited to finally discuss it.  They all have concluded we left off at a sad point in our story.  They are eager to read on to see what happens next with our characters.


Next, the children were introduced to metaphors.  They knew that we used them in our writing, but that was the extent of their background knowledge with metaphors. 

 So we took a minute to define and become better acquainted with metaphors.  We looked at a worksheet together that had eight common metaphors and their meaning.  This let the children see them in action.  It also let them see how using metaphors can make their writing sound exciting.
NO HOMEWORK:  There is No Homework with it being a Holiday Break.  Enjoy the family time!


3rd Grade:  Jane Goodall: We began the week by wrapping up our reading analyzer from The Flowers.  They have a better understanding on completing the analyzer.  We also see how poetry can be a recording of an interaction.  They had a little time left on Monday, so they began to complete a picture of their visualization of our poem.

  We completed our homework in class this week so they wouldn't have any assigned over break.  As a class, we looked up the word activist in the dictionary.  They wrote down the definition and were asked what it means for someone to be an animal activist.  

This led us into our introduction of Jane Goodall.  After introducing her as an ethologist, a scientist who studies animal behavior, we watched an interview on her from 60 minutes.  We will continue studying Jane Goodall's interactions next week.





Ms. Losinski

~  HAPPY FRIDAY ~

    

AROUND THE SCHOOL

November 22nd - 24th: Thanksgiving Break

December 7th: Early Dismissal Day at 1:45

December 22nd: End of 2nd Quarter

December 25th - January 7th: Winter Recess

LANGUAGE ARTS

1st Grade: Persuasive Writing: This week we concluded our lesson on persuasive writing. They added their final sentence - the conclusion - to their paragraph. We then looked at our rubric, so they will understand how it is used in the future.



Later on in our unit, they will follow these same steps on their own. This lessons goal was to teach them to be successful with an independent writing assignment in the future. We also used our paragraphs to practice our presentation skills.



Each student took a turn reading their paragraph working on volume and eye contact. This group really enjoyed Pig Latin, that I made them sad announcing we would be moving onto our next lesson.

2nd Grade: The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane: We started our week by looking at our Venn Diagram. Edward and Velveteen each had a good amount of details on their own side, but now we needed to compare our two stories. We looked at some of our ideas and discussed if they could be true for both stories.
This also was a time where we added a few new post-its that were true to both stories. They did a great job making the text-to-text comparisons. We then changed gears to our 4-level analysis. Our primary focus when completing these will be identifying the preposition a signal word to the prepositional phrase. We looked at a few sample sentences together while identifying our parts of speech.

HOMEWORK: This week the students were asked to read chapter 17 and complete a reading analyzer on this chapter.

3rd Grade: Interactions with Poetry: This week we started our new lesson in our unit. We were looking at interactions through poetry. We looked at a sample of poems from Robert Louis Stephenson's collection in the story The Child's Garden of Verses. Our focus for the lesson was going to be on his poem The Flowers.
We listened to the poem and and the children expressed some confusion - lucky for them we were going to complete a reading analyzer. This brought up the importance of why we use our reading analyzer - to help us understand what we are reading. On their own, the children completed the first two boxes.

Then it went onto new words or key words. The kids did a great job at highlighting a few key or important words to our poem. However, they were tricked by the beginning paragraph. These were actually nicknames for flowers including such words as: purse, smock, and buttons. This is why they were struggling understanding the meaning of the poem. We looked back at the first stanza together. I reminded them the title of our poem was The Flowers. This made one student quickly conclude that they were flowers. I displayed some pictures to each of the flowers in the poem. They were now seeing the key words of fairy and tiny come together with the vision of a fairy forest. We switched gears for a moment to allow a student share their scrapbook from the interaction they shared with nature. It was great seeing this student show all of his interactions on his trip. As a class, we could tell it was a deep and lasting experience he will remember for ever. The students were excited to hear and see his different interactions.

MATH

I wanted to take a moment to wish all my math families a Happy Thanksgiving!  Due to Thanksgiving Break, we will not meet next week.  They were making me hungry this week, as some of them were sharing their favorite foods they eat on Thanksgiving!  

1st Grade: What Happened???: The students were excited to play What Happened this week. They were Rock Stars at this game. Not only did each group successfully answer each question, they were able to always explain in detail the change that occurred from the original shape. There was no tricking them! They were all smiles as they each got to select a prize from the prize box.

This was a fast lesson, as it was time to share our ideas with Imi and Zani. We were asked to share our thoughts on the game we tested. They first answered some displayed scenarios to the game. Then they were asked to explain what strategies helped with while we played the game. Our big focus was on was on identifying the first shape by counting the sides and vertices. Then decide if the shape itself changed or stayed the same.

2nd Grade: Tiling Fun: We are approaching our end goal of creating our own mural. Before they do, it was time to practice tiling ourselves. First, we identified the names of our pattern blocks: triangle, square, hexagon, trapezoid, and 2 rhombuses.


Defining a rhombus, led us into the discussion of shapes going by different names. The different names tell us different things about a shape, some giving more details then others. We discussed how all the shapes were polygons telling us they were closed.


Our specific shapes we were looking at were also all quadrilaterals - letting us know they had 4 sides and 4 vertices. The more specific shape names help by giving us specific information about the sides: if they are parallel or congruent.


Then the students were given a single pattern block and tiled a pattern using our 3 movements. This led us into our introduction of a basic pattern block and identifying the original shapes of a complex pattern.


We looked at one model and figured out how the pattern repeated with the fewest shapes. We were able to find the basic pattern was repeating with 3 shapes. They are almost ready to design their own murals!

3rd Grade: Think Deeply: I gave the students some time to solve on the think deeply on their own. However, they went back to thinking the pattern was the function rule. We worked through it together to help them remember the difference between the function rule and the pattern.

For added practice, we looked at some input/output tables. This made the students look for the function rule first because the numbers were not in order. We then checked our rule by creating a table with terms 1-5, now allowing them to identify the actual pattern. They seemed to have a much better understanding working backwards. Taking the pattern away allowed them to see the rule first. We will start our new lesson after break.

4th Grade: Think Deeply: This week we talked about a few more basic concepts with fractions before responding to our Think Deeply question. I wanted to introduce a few concepts that would help them answer their question mathematically and not depend on our fraction strips.
As a class, we worked together to answer the first Think Deeply question. We walked through it step-by-step to get our answer.



We were looking for the largest fraction with a set of fractions that did not have the same denominators. We were able to quickly eliminate 3 of our fractions because they were less then 2 wholes. This left us with 3 fractions. Then we used our concepts on converting from a mixed number to an improper fraction. Our last step we used our new skill of finding the like denominator and made equivalent
fractions.


Next, we looked at our second Think Deeply and began to set it up as a group. Then they began to solve it on their own. We will finish this lesson when we return from break.


Enjoy the Weekend,

Ms. Losinski