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

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