Welcome October!

On Thursday, we had a surprise school-wide celebration for showing respect, responsibility, and safety. We all became "royalty" and had a chance to decorate our own crowns enjoy some fun music over the intercom. The students worked so hard and were very concentrated on their crowns. We even had a surprise fire drill where we could show off our crowns to the rest of the school! :)

Silly girls! :)

Some students were more excited than others to get their picture taken.

 Today we had our first visit from Police Pal Shannon. She talked to the children about bullying and what to do if you are in a bullying situation. She had some great advice and everyone was very respectful of her and her time! 

Here are some of the things we did this week (and last): 
 
Math- Last week we worked really hard to finish up our rounding lessons and used our new knowledge to estimate sums and differences. 

This week we continued to work on estimating, but also moved into adding 3-digit numbers with regrouping. Next week we will pull out the place value schema from our brains and work on subtracting 3-digit numbers with regrouping. 

 
   

Reading- Last week we read The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polaco. 

When Great Gramma Anna left Russia to come to New York City, she had only the clothes on her back. Soon she had outgrown her dress and babushka (scarf) and her mother used these and other family member's old clothes to make a colorful quilt. "It will be like having the family in back home Russia dance around us at night." As author Patricia Polacco explains, this quilt tells the story of her family from generation to generation, and has been present at all their life events, births, deaths, weddings and other special family celebrations. It is the glue that binds her family together. 

 

We learned more about the book from the author: 

 

This week we read Pepita Talks Twice by Ofelia Dumas Lachtman.  

Pepita speaks Spanish and English, and this becomes a burden to her. She learns how important her languages are, soon after her dog runs into the street.

 

Writing- This week we started brainstorming, discussing, and planning our writing of personal narratives. The students were asked to pick one event from their life. We had a long discussion of choosing a "seed" topic for our narrative instead of a "watermelon" topic. We will use our planning from this week to start writing our narratives next week. 

 
Social Studies- Last week and this week we started learning about maps and mapping skills. Students took a "pre-assessment" and mapped the classroom. Since then we have learned about scale, map keys, a compass rose, having a map title, and map coordinates. We practiced map coordinates by discussing the game Battleship and finding places on a treasure map. On Friday, we practiced creating map keys by creating our own islands. We will continue to cover these and take an assessment over them next week. After that, we should be hopefully ready to start our first science kit. (Pictures to come)


Additional notes: 
Last Friday, we had our first session of Reading Buddies with friends from Ms. Kunde's 1st grade class. We will meet with our Reading Buddies about once a month as a fun way to share our love of reading. 

Some mornings it is hard to get the day started. On Monday, Calypso joined our room during some early morning "Read to Self" time. If you can't tell by the pictures, she was an instant kid magnet.

Have a great weekend! Mrs. Jodie Yuska