Weekly Update

Dear Families,
We have almost finished another week of learning in our classroom and we have so much to share with you this week.
Before I share, I want to remind all parents that our ABS Curriculum Night is scheduled for the 18th of September at 6:30pm.  We hope you can join the teachers in Team Harmony and learn about our year-long curricular goals, units of study and academic programs.  Thank you.
Picture Day is also coming up soon.  It is scheduled for the 17th of September.  Please return your child's picture order form if you are interested in individual portraits.  Thank you.
This week, the students continued learning about the writing process in our writer's workshop classes.  We learned that good authors always re-read their own writing before adding more details to the words or the pictures.  We also learned that good authors sometimes put an "old" piece aside and start a new one.  We continued adding topics and possible story-ideas to our lists inside our writing folders.  We explored various topics through our read alouds.  For example, we read a non-fiction book about kittens and and we also read several fictional stories that symbolized personal narratives and small moment stories.  In class, the students are still exploring various writing styles.  Next week, we will learn more about the editing/revision stages and finally the publishing stage.
In reading, the students continued working on finding "just right" books for their book boxes and for home in our library.  The students are encouraged to think about what makes a successful reading experience.  Sometimes, we might want to look at only the pictures, but sometimes we need to read the book so knowing hoe to select a "just right" book will help us feel successful as readers.  Please ask your child about the books he/she is taking home from the library.  Next week, I will ask the students to bring one "Just right" book and one choice book.  This week, many students brought two choice books.  It is a perfect opportunity to have this conversation with your child.  Thank you for supporting independence in reading!
We continued our scientific explorations this week.  We studied sunflowers this week.  We read a book about the stages of a sunflower's life cycle and then explored the flower and the seed.  We used our science journals and drew pictures and wrote words about what we discovered.  The students are encouraged to use their senses when writing/drawing about science.  We ended our science inquiry with planting a seed in soil.  The children planted a seed each, which they took home today.  I realize this is late in the season and I told the children that it is probably too late to plant these sunflower seeds outside, but we decided that perhaps we have enough sunlight to keep it inside and watch it grow.  Thank you for helping our scientists continue to watch this process.  We also collected seeds from a sunflower that was donated to the classroom by Jaden.  We filled 4 ziplock bags!!!  We will save these for the Spring, when we will pot them again and plant them outside.  We will also estimate and count how many seeds we found inside just one sunflower.  Thank you Jaden!

This week, the students and I also finished our Classroom Contract. We discussed what it means to be safe, kind and responsible at our school and we wrote our ideas down on a big contract for our year together.  We all signed it.  Here is a picture.

Lastly, we created our big murtal symbolizing our theme for the year, "Traveling around the world-join our Friend-SHIP."  We will learn about different cultures and languages all around the world through classroom visits, books, and technology. We started using twitter a few days ago, but will slowly start using it more.  If you wish to follow us, our name is @McCormackPals.  We will also continue to learn Spanish from Mrs. D and connect with classrooms around the world through other means.  If you wish to share something from another culture with us, please let us know.  We would love to have you visit us!  Thank you.

Have a great rest of the week and weekend.  Thank you for supporting your child's learning at home.

Best,
Maria