Weekly Update

Dear families,
I cannot believe that we are off from school next week already to celebrate Thanksgiving.  Time goes by so fast.  This is truly a time to reflect on what we have accomplished so far and where we want to go in the near future; as students, parents, teachers and members of society.  I hope you all have a lovely time together with friends and family next week.  I will be out tomorrow all day as I am attending a science conference in Middlebury.  I planned a special Thanksgiving day project for the children to do tomorrow and I hope you will find them inside their Friday folders tomorrow.  Perhaps they will be your new favorite center piece at your Thanksgiving Day table?

The Scholastic Book Fair was a huge success.  Thanks to all the volunteers who make this event a true celebration of reading and books.  Thank you also to those who donated books to our classroom. Your support for literacy, creativity and learning is greatly appreciated.

The students started using Typing Club a couple of weeks ago in school.  I have linked it on this blog's sidebar.  I will email you passwords and username information so the children can practice at home, if they wish.  Al;though we have, and try to integrate ipads as often as we can into the curriculum, we have to remember that keyboarding skills are still essential computer skills that everyone needs to learn to master.  Typing skills and file structure/hard drive management are important components to my technology integration classes.  As we use technology too, we have to remember that digital citizenship and the core ideas of being "safe, kind and responsible" online still apply.  For a couple of weeks the children have explored "animation-ish", a creative graphing/story-boarding program created by Peter Reynolds.  The students practiced creating small stories with a clear beginning, middle and end, which were told using multiple frames, similar to a flip book.  Soon, we will share our scientific knowledge of pumpkins in google drive and participate in coding, through the national drive "Hour of Code."  Stay tuned for more information.

As a tradition, my students and I "transform" our classroom into a Colonial Classroom the days before Thanksgiving.  This year, was no different (but I forgot to take pictures of our lovely set-up).  Please ask your child to explain how we had to fetch water "from the well", write with quills, bring "wood" into the classroom wood stove and participate in Spelling Bees and stand up when speaking.  Our desks were also placed in rows.  We had so much fun playing Colonial Classroom.

Once again, I wish everyone a relaxing and restful Thanksgiving break.  Remember, there is no school next week for the students.

Best,
Maria

More pumpkin science

Yesterday, the students predicted how many seeds they thought would be inside our pumpkin.  We discussed what reasonable estimates and predictions are, and this morning, they worked in groups to find the actual amount.  Stay tuned for more updates on our calculations

Pumpkin science

We were busy studying pumpkins in our classroom this week.  We used our senses to describe what they look like, feel like and smell like.  We compared two different pumpkins. One big, and one small.  One pumpkin was also healthy and fresh, while the other one was starting to rot.  This comparison made it easier for us to think of describing words using our senses.  We also made predictions about the circumference before we measured it.  We learned that predictions are like guesses, but they are reasonable guesses.  We will continue our pumpkin science next week by studying the seeds and weight.

Thinking about character traits

This week, the students continued to explore character traits in our reader's workshop.  We learned how we can flag important pages using post-it notes to remember these traits and how they relate to the story.  As a class, we went on a scavenger hunt using the "Piggie and Elephant" books.
We finished our author study of Mo Willems this week.  We will continue to explore character traits next week, using different mentor texts.

Exploring dialogue in writing

The students explored different ways to show dialogue and conversations in their writing this week.  We looked at different books and authors and tried to integrate their ideas into our own writing.  We learned that we can use speech bubbles and thinking bubbles.  We learned that we can be creative when we use those.  We also learned how to use dialogue directly in our writing by using quotation marks.  Here are some examples.

Small moments

We are in the midst of writing our small moment stories.  We created a mural in our classroom to help us come up with new story ideas.  We think of our small moment stories as the seeds inside watermelons.  They are small parts of a bigger whole.  For example, a good small moment story idea could be when I went to the beach with my mom. While going on vacation with my family would be "too big".  We learn to zoom in and stretch our ideas out.
We also discovered that we have many small moments here at school together so we created a visual reminder of those as well.