Weekly Newsletter

Our next virtual PTO meeting will take place on Thursday, February 8th at 7:00 PM. Here is the link to join: https://meet.google.com/bhc-huat-mdp

Everyone is welcome! Our agenda will include dance and ice skating recap, code of conduct, budget, assemblies, school store fundraiser, and other activities.

Our dramatic play center has been transformed into a Post Office and each child decorated their own mailbox! Preschoolers are very interested in this new learning center and are embracing the role of a postal worker. They wear costumes, sell stamps, and deliver letters and packages. If they are not working in the post office, they are busy at the writing center drawing pictures to mail to their classmates. Our postal workers will be extra busy on Wednesday, Valentine’s Day, finding their friends’ mailboxes and mailing their valentines.

Preschoolers continue to learn all about birds. The focus this week was on feathers. Did you know that birds are the only animals that have feathers? The children have been exploring different kinds of feathers and they have been noticing similarities and differences among the various types of feathers. Preschoolers know that long straight feathers are used to help a bird fly and they can be found on wings or tails. They also learned that short fluffy feathers keep birds warm and dry. One of the most exciting feathers they have discovered is a peacock feather that is almost as tall as a preschooler. We talked about the purpose of those fancy long feathers and how the male peacock fans them out to attract a mate. The children were also encouraged to look for birds outside to see different colors of bird feathers among the species that live right here. They noticed that some of the birds have bright colorful feathers, while others have feathers that help them to be camouflaged. We will continue our study on birds!

We had a 100 days of school celebration this week! We did lots of movement games and songs to celebrate the number 100. One hundred seems like a lot, but it is just ten 10s! We made crowns to wear that said, “100 Days Smarter,” and enjoyed some new changes in our room—like a new welcome song, a new pointer for reading charts, and a new calendar song! In math, we did a lot of fun activities to continue our celebration of the number 100! We completed our own 100 charts that were missing the 10s, we played a race to 100 game, and we also made predictions of how full a baby jar would get with 100 drops of water. Then we counted out 100 drops to find the answer!

Our Brook trout are now in the swim up phase, which means they have absorbed their yolk sac and are now ready to feed. First graders enjoy entering the classroom each morning to see the trout swimming and observe any growth that is happening. We are beginning to see trout that are slightly larger and some that swim faster. We are keeping track of all the growth and changes in our Brook trout journals. First graders are taking turns feeding the Brook trout and will soon begin yelling to gather water quality data. Check out the growth below!

On Wednesday first graders celebrated their 100th day of school! Children brought in collections of 100 items. Each first grader shared their item as well as what their strategy was for counting to 100. Some friends counted by 10s, others by 1s and one student shared that she added two groups of 5s to make 10 and used this strategy all the way to 100! Below is a picture of many of the items collected- paper clips, cheerios, pennies, nails, raisins, legos, pencils, buttons, markers and cotton balls just to name a few!

Third graders are working hard this week to finish writing and typing their Pourquoi Tales. This week they learned about temporal words, which tell of the passing of time in a story, and they added at least three temporal words to their stories. It is exciting to see these in their finished forms and getting ready for illustrating.

With our buddies this week third graders made beautiful woven hearts, which is a tricky yet rewarding activity. The students did a great job showing perseverance and patience in completing this task for their buddies.

We are continuing to integrate science and ELA while learning about the design process. Last week, we joined forces with the Mexico exchange students to design and race balloon-powered cars. Students uncovered the importance of concepts like wind resistance and friction by observing different cars as they raced. We were also able to compare designs from last week’s wind-powered cars in order to identify elements that were successful in both design challenges, including a low center of gravity and a wide wheel base. This has been a really engaging experience for our students and has also allowed them to think about the importance of different Habits of Character. See a video of the car that won HERE!!!

This week I wanted to share about what some of the younger grades have been doing in the library through photos. In pre-school, we read The Colors of Us by Karen Katz. We talked about how skin colors come in all sorts of beautiful colors, and we looked through a box of Crayola’s Colors of the World colored pencils.

First and second graders are doing a great job getting into the rhythm of “library stations,” four different skill-based stations that they are rotating through on a four-week cycle. Students are learning to put books in alphabetical order by author’s last name, reading with “reading buddies,” playing computational games, and learning to read call numbers to locate books in the library.

Finally, the 3rd grade library is really coming together! We have divided into three different subcommittee groups: 1) book organization, 2) aesthetics & non-book activities, and 3) rules and procedures. Third graders are doing wonderful work together!

Check out these free math apps offered through The Math Learning Center. “These free apps are based on the visual models featured in Bridges in Mathematics. Apps are available in multiple versions: a web app for all modern browsers, and downloadable versions for specific operating systems and devices (such as Apple iOS for iPad).” Enjoy! :) aprew@mtrsd.org