Weekly Update

Dear Families,
This has been a very busy week for our classroom.  We started many new projects and we are so excited to tell you about them.

First, my class will begin working on a book along with Denise Wentz, our school librarian.  We just finished publishing our stories from our Writer's Workshop this week, and began our new unit on non-fictional writing.  Denise and I wanted to provide more opportunities for the children to write, research and use various forms of technology in a collaborative setting so the idea of making a book together was born.  The book is entitled "A is for Allen Brook" and it will include aspects of our special school in an alphabetical sequence.  The students have been partnered up and they will research and write about our school together.  Some students will write about our playground, while others will research our wind-turbine and garden.  Denise and I have created topics for every letter of the alphabet and all the children will receive help gathering information, taking pictures or conducting interviews with the "experts" at our school.  All of the information the students gather will eventually be put together into an essay, which will function as a "chapter" in our ABC book.  Denise and I will also have the book published in hard-cover format and make it available in our school library for everyone to read.  The children are so excited to get started.  I know many of you filled out my "Helping Hands" Volunteer Form at the beginning of the year.  I will contact you shortly to see if you are still willing and able to help us in writing and reading, because this book/research project would really benefit from additional adult help.  Thank you all for your continued support and if this research-project sounds interesting to you and you did not indicate that you are interested in helping out in reading or writing, please let me know.  Denise and I will start introducing the topics to the students next week and they will start using our ipads to take pictures for their writing pieces.

Second, our class is also participating in an online global collaborative community called "Flat Classroom".  Sharon Davison's Kindergarten class and Laura Dyer's Kindergarten class are also participating from our school.  Thousands of schools around the worls join together and share their learning together digitally.  We are now in the process of creating our global "hello, or greeting".  It is called "a Handshake" and we have decided to make a music video to go along with our ABS Song.  Linda Scott, our Technology Specialist, is helping us and we started filming today.  We hope to be done sometime next week and we will, of course, share the video with you.

This week in science, students continued learning about spiders, bats,and other interesting plants and animals in our life cycle and adaptations workshops.  I hope you saw some of their wonderful creations this afternoon.  We also continued learning about the weather.  Some words we explored this week: forecast, weather front, meteorologist.

In writing, the students finished publishing their first pieces.  We will share these at our conferences.  We began writing "All About" books this week.  All About books introduce the students to non-fiction writing without the pressure of having to do research as they are encouraged to write about a topics they already know a lot about.  For example, some students write all about soccer. The book might have a chapter on rules, equipment and how to kick the ball.  The students also explore how to create a table of contents, labeled pictures and a glossary.

Lastly, the students learned how to access books on our wiki today.  This is very familiar to the second graders, but new to the first graders.  Please send in a pair of head-phones for your child to use in our classroom for listening to books online.  Thank you.

Have a great day tomorrow and a wonderful weekend.
Regards,
Maria