~ THOUGHTFUL THURSDAY ~

Can you believe it...we are already a week into November! Our focus this month will be Just Keep Swimming  - some of my classes came up with a great list of ways to build our character from the movie Finding Nemo.  This week we talked about having the right attitude to achieve our goals.  We will build on each week with a new trait.

~ First Trivia Winner~

Congratulations to our first trivia winner! Each week the children try to guess the weekly quote to our monthly theme and after three correct guesses they get to pick a prize from the treasure box. We have a few more friends close to their first prize - keep the guesses coming!

The school reached their first goal on caps!  They are now working towards having enough for a second buddy bench.  They will continue to collect them until December 9th, so please continue to support them and send in those caps.

~ Leaders ~

Sense of Humor!

It was great seeing all of the children work on their traits from last month.  Below are some of the friends who made it into the club for their leadership role in the classroom.  These students always set an example for their classmates, used their listening skills to stay on task and model good behaviors around the room.  

Check back next week for a few more of our friends from the Character of the Month Club!  

I will also share our friends that always make us smile and add the element of fun into our day!

LANGUAGE ARTS

1st Grade:  Silly Speak - Guess My Connection: This week we began to explore another secret code together.  The children had to look at the buttons from a telephone as their tool to decode the message.  After a few minutes on their own, we worked together for them to learn how to use our new tool.  They finished the message on their own.  They discovered we could learn to speak a secret language!  Before we could learn our new language we needed to review some phonics.

On Tuesday, we continued to talk about some of the patterns we see in words.  We worked on a worksheet sounding out syllables and identifying the first vowel sound we heard in a word.  After that I introduced the children to our secret language they will learn - Pig Latin.  I displayed a few words to learn how to speak them and then we looked at the rules for Pig Latin.  At the end of the day, I announced it was time to eanclay upway and they were excited when they decoded it to clean-up!  We will continue to work with Pig Latin throughout our next lesson.

Getting the wiggles out - after lots of writing!

2nd Grade:  Grammar Introduction:  We started the day sharing our thoughts and questions we had from our homework.  This led us into a class discussion over chapters 3 and 4 from their reading assignment.  Then we began to talk about parts of speech in a sentence.  As a class, we listed off the parts of speech and their definitions.  Then the children were introduced to the Four-Level Analysis Worksheet.  We completed it together using the sentence “She shone as bright as the stars on a moonless night.”

On Tuesday, we continued to work on labeling a sentence and discussing the parts.  We will continue to work on parts of speech and parts of a sentence throughout the year.

3rd Grade:  Tall Tales - Grammar:  This week we started off with a review on nouns, pronouns and verbs.  They read a Halloween story and had to identify all of the nouns in the story.  Then they want back and looked for all of the pronouns.  After finding the pronouns, the students drew a line from the pronoun to the noun it replaced in the sentence.  The last step was to look through the passage and highlight all of the action verbs.  When they completed the Halloween story - they took a selection from a Tall Tale and followed the same steps again.

We did not meet on Tuesday because of an assembly for the Cookie Dough Fundraiser.

4th Grade: Men and Women Who Changed the World:  This week we started out with a little review on parts of speech.  We started out by listing the parts of speech and defining them.  After that we watched a few videos from School House Rock to help us remember some of their roles in the sentence.  Next we went through a list of sentences identifying first the subject and the predicate. Finally,we labeled each word with the part of speech it represented in the sentence.

On Tuesday, the students came in and chose a short biography to read.  Then they spread out around the room to read it.  After they finished with their book they completed an organizer to help them summarize the story they read.  We will continue with this project next week.

MATH

1st Grade:  I did not meet with my groups this week because of early dismissal.

2nd Grade:  Length - Marble Crash Test:  This week we came back together as a class to record all of our data onto one sheet.  We compared the results between the groups.  Then we conducted the experiment together as a class to discuss what might have happened to affect our results.  We ran into our first problem on making sure you have a flat surface to work on or the marble would not travel, but instead roll backwards.  

Then we moved to another table and saw that on the first test the marble went so far it traveled to the floor.  So we decided it would be best to conduct our experiment on the same surface the groups did - the carpet.  When demonstrating and measuring we discussed what happened if the vertex wasn’t aligned properly - and a group responded that it caused their marble to fall off the track before it reached marble 2.  Then we talked about the position of our post-it notes to mark the marble - some groups responded that they had to move their post-it notes to the side or the marble would hit it and stop.  As we worked through the experiment again the students were making predictions each time we increased the height.  

The students concluded:  the higher the height the faster marble one traveled causing the marble two to go further when they crashed.  We took our class results and compared them with the list and we saw some groups had the similar pattern.  We were able to see if there was no change in the inch from one trial to another - it may have been because of an estimation in the previous trial.  They did a great job analyzing their results!

On Thursday, we looked at the problem Dru and Teller have and began to fill out our Think Sheet. We had to decided who measured correctly Dru or Teller - one measured 7 inches and the other measured 14 half inches. The class decided they were both correct with their measurement.  The children worked independently to explain their reasoning to why both Dru and Teller measured correctly.

3rd Grade:  Linear Measurement - In Search of the Yeti:  Class began by hearing a story of the Abominable Snowman, or Yeti of the Himalayas.  Then they were asked to identify the different measurements we heard in the story - altitude and distance.  This lead us into a class discussion first learning about altitude - we looked at a chart listing the highest altitude in each state and a map of the United States showing the different elevations.  The map helped them visualize and understand the idea of sea level better.  Then we went into a discussion on distance and visualizing yards - an example of a football field became a perfect benchmark for us to imagine 100 yards!

On Thursday, we worked  together to find a benchmark around the school - we measured out the longest hallway in the building.  We discovered that the hallway was about 120 yards. Longer then the football field we used yesterday! We took a minute to imagine 3 times that length and how hard it would be to photograph the yeti. We also took note of where 100 yards was in the hallway to relate it back to our football field benchmark. They had a great day working as a team!

4th Grade:  The Shape of Things - Triple Play with Shapes:  The first part of group we spent time comparing our individual Think Deeply questions to a sample response the book provided.  After reading three different samples, I had the children reread their response and then grade their own.  I then met with each one of them to discuss their response and scores. They did a great job for our first time writing independently for math!  Then we moved onto lesson 2.  I explained to them that now that we can define the definition and math attributes of our shapes - we are going to take it a step further and work on comparing and contrasting shapes.  We opened the lesson by looking at the assignment Some, All or None.  We completed the first question together and the students learned about giving a counterexample to a false statement.  To take question 1 a step further they were asked to make a list of similarities and differences between a parallelogram and rectangle.

On Thursday, we created a chart together comparing and contrasting the rectangle and the parallelogram.  Then they worked through the rest of the page on their own.  As one more warm-up exercise to our new concept, they also completed Three of These Things Belong Together.  They were given 4 shapes and had to identify the one that does not fit the group and then explain why it did not belong.

IMPORTANT DATES:

November 1st-18th:  Cookie Dough Fundraiser

November 4th:  No School

November 9th:  Picture Retakes

November 16th & 17th:  Camp Goodfellow – Sloan

November 23rd-25th:  Thanksgiving Break – No School