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