Such a fun Friday!

Today we had so much fun at the Homecoming parade, making applesauce, and celebrating being Respectful, Responsible, and Safe by receiving t-shirts and tattoos from the amazing Prairie Crest PTO. Thanks to everyone who volunteered to help make this a memorable, but very smooth day. Our class proved to have quite a few future cheerleaders.

Here are some of the things we did this week: 
 
Morning Meetings- This week we talked a lot about conflict and resolution in our lives as well as in fairy tales. One of these lessons included a discussion about personality traits and how they can affect friendships. I asked everyone to write a few personality traits about themselves and I loved what they came up with! 

Today we discussed the use and importance of teamwork and how when we all work as a team wonderful things can happen (such as applesauce). This also tied to the book we have been reading to work on procedures for Guided Reading groups. I think the kids were just as excited about the apple peels as they were the applesauce. :)

 

Math- This week we looked at mental math with addition and subtraction. We worked a lot of subtracting numbers with regrouping. We learned a few little rhymes to try to help us. 1) More on the floor, go next door, and borrow ten more; 2) Bigger bottom need to borrow. We also have worked on rounding to the nearest 10. We seem to have that down and will learn rounding to the nearest 100 next week.

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Reading- This week we read  Ye-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China by Ai-Ling Louie. 

This story includes all of the classic elements that we are familiar with, the evil step mother, an unattractive step-sister, an emperor looking for a bride, the wayward slipper (though this one is golden, not glass)...but it also has its differences. In place of the fairy god-mother we are used to, there is a kindly old man who offers sage advice to Yeh-Shen (and he appears once about midway thought the story) and of course, there is the magical fish who makes Yeh-Shen's life bearable and makes her dreams come true in the end.

Writing- This week in writing we reviewed nouns and pronouns while setting up  our Language Arts notebooks. We also started to work on just the basics of cursive. This will hopefully help us when we start to learn how to make the different letters.

Science and Social Studies-  We finished our discussions in Social Studies and tied them to our morning meetings talking about leaders, first followers, more followers and a crowd. We talked about the importance about being a leader and sticking up for yourself, while the first follower is the person who tells the rest of the followers and the crowd that a behavior is acceptable for others to join in with. The class had amazing discussions while viewing pictures of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. With discussions like these, I am really excited about our segregation/ civil rights unit coming later in the year. Last but not least we talked about how we can have a voice in our community, whether it is through public meetings, holding a peaceful protest, endorsing a candidate, or voting.

Additional notes: 

CROCK POT APPLESAUCE

10 lg. cooking apples, peeled, cored & sliced or cut in chunks

1/2 c. water

1 tsp. cinnamon

1/2 to 1 c. sugar

Put all ingredients into crock pot. Should be about 3/4 full. Cover and cook on low 8 to 10 hours (high 3 to 4 hours).

AGENDAS AND TAKE HOME FOLDERS

 These will go home each day and come back to school each day in your child’s backpack. This folder serves as a means of communication between school and home. Please make sure to check and initial your child’s agenda and take home folder every day.  If you have questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to write me notes in the Agenda. 

Prairie Backpack!

Informational Flyers Now Posted on Prairie Backpack

Prairie Backpack is College Community School District's "green" approach to distributing information from school sponsored activities and non-profit organizations. If you would like to be notified of informational flyers, you can subscribe by visiting www.prairiebackpack.org.

All flyers will be posted on Prairie Backpack so check out the site so you don't miss out on school and community information and opportunities.

Class Basket: Any donations for our grade-level Fun Fair baskets (Backyard Fun) are greatly appreciated!  Thanks to those who have already donated.  Please have donations in by October 17^th! Please take a look at end of summer sales for great ideas.

Have a great weekend! 
Mrs. Jodie Yuska

I apologize

Sorry for the delay in this week's post. I unfortunately have had some technology issues with getting the blog to post and emails to send. I have a huge amount still sitting in my outbox. I will try to work my way though all of them this weekend, just to make sure there is nothing I am missing. However, I apologize for the delay.

If you didn't already see, our class is famous. Thanks to Mrs. Hahn, Mrs. Hayes, and Mrs. Ternes, our class was in great hands today while I was home with a 102 degree fever. It was a nice surprise to see on the Prairie Crest Facebook page.

Here are some of the things we did this week (and last) : 
 
Morning Meetings- We have spent a lot of our morning meetings building our classroom community. We are working on describing and working through examples of what it means to show respect, be responsible, and to be safe. Through this process we have read a lot of great books and the kids are making connections and using these words in their everyday vocabulary. This week we also discussed having empathy. We discussed the non-literal meaning of placing yourself in someone else's shoes to see their side of something. After that we worked on using I messages as a way to communicate our positive an negative feelings in a way people will hopefully be able to better understand. For example, I feel proud when you follow directions the first time I asked because we were able to get a lot done. Thank you! or I feel sad when you tap on my desk because I can not hear directions. Please stop. This week we also discussed having a positive attitude and coming to school ready to learn.

We are Respectful:

Keys to a successful year: 

Ways we can be responsible: 

 Our class acknowledgement crest:

Math- This week we completed Topic 1 in our Envisions curriculum. Topic 1 covers place value of numbers through hundred thousands. This included taking a look at numbers in standard form, expanded form, and word form.

The class is getting really good at transferring their thoughts from the board into their red math notebook. Soon we will start to transfer problems from the book to our red notebooks. 

Reading- This week we read  Cinderella. This story follows the similar story of Cinderella from Disney. This was great for using our schema to compare and contrast with this version of our story as well as make connections with other fairy tales. We started to take a look at story structure and something we can find in every fairy tale- conflict and resolution. 

Writing- Last week we worked on creating super sentences and how to build a better sentence by adding details. We used these lessons to also try and reinforce that a sentence begins with a capital letter, ends with a punctuation mark, and has lower case letters in between unless there is a proper noun, such as a name or specific place. This week we learned about subjects and predicates. They really enjoyed using subject and predicate dice to make some silly sentences. 

 
Science and Social Studies- In social studies we have been learning about communities. It started off discussing the differences of a city, suburb, town, and farming community. Then we discussed how they were all interdependent on each other. From there we took a look at the three branches of government. We used our new schema to learn and discuss the jobs as well as the similarities and differences in local, state, and federal government. On Thursday we took a look at the Bill of Rights, which is the first ten amendments from the U.S. Constitution. After learning about the Bill of Rights and what each of them stood for we created our own classroom Bill of Rights to help us know regulations and boundaries within our classroom. 

 

Additional Note: Last week students took their MAP tests in both reading and math. We are waiting on a few students to finish taking the test so I can collect scores. I can't wait to see where their benchmark scores place them and start writing some goals on where we want to go in our learning this year! After spending two days back to back in the computer lab last week we enjoyed some down time, and a popsicle. YUM!

We also rearranged our desks. I try to do this about once a month to give everyone an opportunity to work and be grouped with different students in our classroom. (I took the picture during our read to self time)

 Last but not least: With the roller coaster of weather this week and record highs only being in the 50's please make sure you send a jacket or sweatshirt with your child to school. We are using the “feels like” temperature of 50 degrees from KCRG to guide us in utilizing the visual.  If students see this picture in the window by the office they should wear a jacket outside to recess. 

 

Have a great weekend! GO CYCLONES! :)
Mrs. Jodie Yuska