Junior Achievement

We spent several hours over Friday, May 17 and also Friday, May 24 having a visitor from Junior Achievement.  Miss Aleah taught us some lessons on wants and needs, saving and borrowing, and earning and paying taxes.  Here, the students are working together to make "donuts" to see how many correctly made donuts each group could make in the time allowed.

Later, Miss Aleah inspected our donuts to look for defects and gave each group credit for the number of correctly produced donuts they had made.

Dr. Trixie's Office

Reading Series Books

These were taken from the new Reading Workshop Unit of Reading Series Books.  Here, you see two people reading their series book and getting ready to meet in their book group.  They are collecting information about the characters and noticing how they respond to problems in the story.

This is a book group meeting to talk about their series book.  Each student read a 'Trixie' book.  They each took turns to share their thoughts on the characters, and then compared the character's traits between different books.

This is a group discussing their ideas about the characters of an Iris and Walter book.

The Big Hill

We made the best of a rainy day and had the Big Hill come to us!  We did all the activities we would have had, just inside.  Here Mr. Hopping is showing us diagrams of different creatures found in the pond.

We talked about birds with Mrs. Rowe.  We looked at the birds she brought, and then talked about the different kinds of beaks.  

Here, we examined animal skulls and talked about what kind of animal the skull must have belonged to.  We made observations about the teeth to help us make a guess of which animal it could be.

"Fishing" in the "pond". 😊 The teachers fished for us and brought over a big collection of creatures for us to examine.  We were able to use the finders to see them up close.

We even held a leech!

EEK!  I am always surprised how fast time flies each May- especially since we've been keeping busy!  ☺  I've been taking lots of photos along the way with our activities.  Stay tuned while I play "catch up" on our last 2 weeks.  Thanks for your patience with me!!  😊

Using Our "Poet" Eyes

This past week, we began our work in our Poetry writing unit.  We learned about using our "poet's" eyes.  This means that we try to look "beyond" the actual object and think about what the object could be like.  ie:  A cotton ball is like a cloud, a pillow, and a marshmallow.  

Each table got a tub of objects (shells, ping pong balls, rocks, etc.)  Then each student chose an object to write about.  We tried to use many of our 5 senses when describing the object (how it looks, feels, sounds, ...).

This Week's Learning

Coming Up For This Week:  (April 29)

Word Work:  Review of all previous spelling patterns especially long a and long i vowel team words.  (Words such as light, high, chain, stray are some examples.)

Reading:  Unit:  Series Book Clubs
Lessons:  Series Book Readers Collect Information About the Main Characters, Readers Pay Attention to How Characters Respond to Problems, Notice Similarities in Characters Across a Series

Writing:  Poetry
Lessons:  Seeing With Poet's Eyes, Listening for Line Breaks, Putting Powerful Thoughts in Tiny Packages

Math:  Unit 4 - Geometry

Lessons:  Recognizing and Drawing Shapes, Understand Tiling in Rectangles

Social Sciences:  Finishing up Natural Resources, Renewable Resources and Non-Renewable Resources

• Thursday - Trip to the Big Hill in the afternoon.  This could be held at school if the weather is still rainy.  The Big Hill Facilitators will determine this for us on that day.

Upcoming Dates

• Wednesday, May 8 - Muffins for Mom
• Wednesday, May 8 - Visit to Dr. Trixie's Office.  More info to come on this.
• Monday, May 13 - iReady Reading spring testing
• Wednesday, May 15 - iReady Math spring testing
• Thursday, May 16 - Grandparent Lunch (last names A-L)
• Friday, May 17 - Grandparent Lunch (last names M-Z)