It's the Shocking Sugar Gliders!

Friday Workshops
Friday, January 29th
Claire
Owen

Important Dates
Friday, January 29th - Swimming in the morning
Thursday, February 4th - Field trip to Seattle
Friday, February 12th - Valentine's Day party
February 15th-19th - No School

Swimming!

We are having so much fun swimming on Fridays! This last week I stayed out of the pool and I had a wonderful time watching the children and observing all of their play and interactions. There are children practicing their jumps into the pool or tricks like standing on their hands or doing somersaults. Some are playing with water toys or practicing diving, floating, or swimming. Others continue their imaginative play as seals, dolphins, or sharks. What I enjoyed most was watching the older children play with the youngers by giving them rides on their backs around the pool or pulling them around while the youngers practiced kicking their legs. These sweet moments gives me a deep appreciation for our school's commitment to multi-age experiences and the lessons everyone receives, be it learning how to do something, asking for support from a friend, or the joy of helping/teaching/giving to another.

Math

We continue playing math games that help us practice our multiplication. One game we played this week was "Concentration." This game is much like Memory in that we needed to match up equations with the answer while remembering what cards we already turned over and where they were!

We have begun looking at multiplication geometrically by creating rectangles on grid paper (our floor tiles). For example, when playing "Floor Tiles" we roll a die and that is how many rows our tile will be. We roll again and this how many squares will be in each of our rows. If I rolled a three and then a two, I would create a rectangle that is three rows high and contain two squares across (3 x 2) which covers 6 squares. Working with grids and thinking about multiplication geometrically helps the children create another picture in their mind of multiplication. We will continue this work next week with a special guest! Hmmmmm...I wonder who that could be? Hint: She smells of gumdrops and Jeriann always hides from her!

Look in our room for our beautiful multiplication designs! We used multiplies and our eye for patterns to create these amazing works of art.

Language

We began our week with words sorts. Some worked on beginning blends like "br, cr, gr, and tr" while some practiced the ending sound "dge, ge." Others worked on "ie, ee" and some practiced "air, are." Our wonderful word sorts allow the children to practice sounds and spelling patterns that are developmentally appropriate for where they are as a learner. At least half of your child's spelling words for the week come from the word sorts.

Some children began book clubs this week. One group is reading The Cat Who Wished to be a Man. We are all enjoying the book immensely which is making it a bit of a challenge for us to keep our pinkie promise to not read past our agreed amount (although we are keeping our promise)! We have read the first five chapters independently and together practiced writing short summaries and predictions in our book club folders. We also practiced thinking of questions that require deeper thinking and allow us to synthesize, evaluate, or investigate the text further. Next week we will prepare this work independently before we meet and then share and discuss with the group. We will practice taking notes on the main characters, secondary characters, setting, and theme.

Another group began reading Horrible Harry and the Ant Invasion. We are reading this book aloud to one another and sharing our thoughts and question verbally. Others continue to practice reading with our readers like Aesop's Fables and reading without picture clues.

***There is a new addition to homework this week! We will begin our literature responses in February. All the details are in your child's homework binder.***

Theme

Goodbye space and hello rainforests! We are all VERY excited about rainforests. The list of topics we are interested in learning about include tigers, cocoa pods, poisonous frogs, plants, peoples of the rainforest, weather, fruits, tigers, birds, sloths.....the list goes on and on!

We will now answer to the the name of Shocking Sugar Gliders. I had no idea what a sugar glider was (I thought it was an insect!) until the children showed me this cute picture.

Shockingly cute!

News from the Moon Toons!

Friday Workshops

January 22nd

Oliver

Jack

January 29th

Claire

Owen

Reminders

Friday, January 22nd - Swimming in the morning!

Friday, January 29th - Last swimming field trip

Thursday, February 4th - All day trip to Seattle Science Center

Math

We continue our work with multiplication and practicing our facts by playing a few games. We have Tic-Tac-Toe with a Twist and BINGO this week. Children choose what level to work on by the board they decide to play. For example, a younger may choose to work on the 2's facts and use the 2 Tic-Tac-Toe board. An older who has had more experience working with multiplication may choose the 8 or 9 board. And then there is everyone in between! The same is true for BINGO and future games. These games are fun, provide practice in learning multiplication concepts and facts, and everyone can play at their own level.

Language

On Tuesday we thought about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his life. After reading about his life's work we thought about a few important words like peace, diversity, freedom, justice, inclusion, dream, liberty, and leadership. We each took a word and found the definition in the dictionary (great dictionary practice!). We recorded the definition and wrote a response about what the word means to us and our lives. Look for your child's response on our door!

We also watched a short video about MLK's march on Washington and his dreams. MLK's commitment to peace and non-violence, even when there was so much violence happening around him and to him, impressed us all. We thought about how important it is to have dreams and the amazing work that can be accomplished when someone dedicates themselves to their dream. We wrote our own dreams in the style of his speech. The dreams are beautiful - yay to our future leaders!!!

The end of our journey through space has brought us all to a new planet! Yes, we have each found a new planet that has life forms! We are using our most descriptive words to describe the planet and the life form. We also need to think like scientists and make sure our facts seem believable and our life forms fit with their habitat. We will think about details, such as how our life form has adapted to the planets habitat and how long it takes for the planet to rotate on it's axis.

Theme

We finally made our sextants! We ran out of time last week so we had fun this week using our new tool and practicing this form of measurement. We found as we walked closer to a high distant object the degrees increased.

And our study of stars could not be complete without a look at a well-known artist's painting of stars....Van Gogh! We will learn about his life and work and his unique style of painting, especially stars, and then paint our own version of a "Starry night."

News from the Marvelous Martians

We've had a fun week! We've deviated a bit from our normal routines, adding some new elements...all in all its been quite enjoyable.

Math

Our work with subtraction continues in Math. We learned some new games...grab bag subtraction, subtraction 5 in a row, and subtraction bowling (who knew this could be so fun!). Some of these are new and others are twists on all familiars. Subtraction 5 in a row is similar to BINGO, although you are subtracting two numbers to see where to place a chip. In subtraction bowling we are creating equations based on the number of pins knocked down...as you can imagine this was a big hit!

I am blown away to see the equations the kids are able to create each day in morning circle. I create things like __+__+__-__-__=10. The kids need to fill in the blanks to create a true equation! This has become a favorite element of morning circle, with many asking for more and more equations! We spent one day this week working on entire pages of these equations! WOW!

Language Arts

Have you ever had a time when you're doing something and thought to yourself, "Wow! This would make a great story?" We are practicing catching these moments and tucking them away in our pockets, so that when writing workshop comes around our pockets will be full of ideas! You might help your child catch some ideas! When we pull these stories out of our pockets, we are practicing using our fingers to tell stories with beginning, middles and ends. We continue to work with partners to plan our daily writing.

We are very lucky to have Sandra (Ella's Mom) coming to teach us handwriting! She is teaching us to make letters using four basic strokes, a simplistic, hands-on and wonderful approach (I am really enjoying learning alongside the kids!). We've been using wooden blocks, chalkboards, play dough and of course, paper and pencils! The goal is to make writing less laborious, as well as to help kids neaten up their writing. Thanks Sandra!

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we did some thinking (and writing) about our own dreams for our families, our school and the world. Check out these profound thoughts...they will be up on display soon!

Theme

Comets and constellations have been the focus this week. We learned the parts of a comet and made our very own comets, using aluminum foil and ribbon. What fun it has been to fly these in the gym!

We are perplexed by the fact that the constellations don't really look like the objects they represent! Hmmm....And how do you know exactly which stars to look for when you could see that shape in many places in the sky?

Each child has picked a constellation to focus on. Be sure to ask your child what he or she picked! These are all constellations that can be seen in the Northern Hemisphere, so you might even try locating it i we have a clear night! So far we have made images of our constellations using stars, and sketches with a bit of imagination and colored pencils. Next week we'll work on learning the stories of our constellations and will finally teach our friends about all that we've learned!

Investigations

We've had a bit of choosing time in the classroom this week, but we've also spent some time playing group games in the gym, as well as creating peace doves in honor of MLK day...look for these in the window next to the door!

Have a wonderful long weekend everyone! Remember no school on Monday!