CHEERS TO A GREAT BEGINNING!

It's hard to believe that it's September already and that we just finished our first full week of school!  This year we welcome many new friends and families to our school community, as well as Jen, our amazing 3rd, 4th and 5th grade teacher!

Our first days of school have been filled with community activities galore...friendship building games, brainstorming classroom agreements, meeting our reading buddies (yippee!), thinking about what we'd like to learn about this year, learning routines, and lots of socializing!  This year we have been (and plan to continue) spending a lot of time together as a whole school community!  It has been really nice seeing kids of all ages interacting, helping one another, and playing together at recess!  Everyone seems to be transitioning into the new school year well.  There have been some tears here and there (it's hard being in a new place all day!), and it is heart-warming to see the love and caring that students show in comforting each other!

Make Kind Choices is one of the 3 OCS agreements.  What does this mean?  

See what our class had to say!

 Helping a friend learn to pour water!

An art project to help us get to know each other a bit better!  What are your favorite things?

What an enthusiastic group this is!  After many requests from returning students for Writing Workshop, we jumped right in!  Everyone did some writing at a "just right" level.  We continue the tradition of having Writing Workshop on Mondays and Wednesdays from 11 to 12.  If you are ever interested in seeing what it's all about, feel free to stop by!  The hour is filled with mini writing lessons, writing about self-chosen topics, and sharing.  One of my favorite things about Writing Workshop is that it allows students to participate and grow as a writer at a level suited perfectly to them...that, and I love reading the stories!

Our Tuesday/Thursday Language Arts time is typically set aside for centers.  Our first practice run went quite smoothly!

Putting together an alphabet puzzle.

The handwriting program we use, uses just four strokes to build all of the capital letters!   Perhaps we can build our names!

 Coloring alphabet charts that we will use during Writing Workshop to help us with sounds.

Our classroom has become filled with patterns, as we delve into our first math unit!  I feel like I'm in a Dr. Seuss book...patterns here, patterns there, patterns everywhere!  Aside from math, I am seeing patterns emerge in art projects, with the kynex and in dramatic play!  It's been lots of fun learning and practicing our first math games!  If you ask, your child may be able to show you how to play What's Missing? at home!

Building a pattern with bears!

A very "fancy" pattern!

                         

 Reading a pattern...blue, white, blue white...

Friday workshops are already a very popular time!  And for a very good reason!  Thank you teachers!  I love watching (and participating) as the kids teach each other!  

Fun with Perfection! 

UNO!

Each day we end our time with Investigations, which is a time for  less structured play and socializing.  It has been fun watching play evolve as friends get to know one another!  At times everyone plays together and at others there are smaller groups or even individual play.  One thing I've noticed so far is that the groups seem to be very fluid and inclusive!  Folks are getting along well and using respectful words to make request!  Yippee!

 Tinker Toys!  

The horses have been popular!

Working together to dress the baby!  We have a very well taken care of baby!

This year we have classroom jobs!  The jobs will rotate weekly.  I have been ever so impressed with how seriously the kids are taking their jobs!  There's been vacuuming galore (yay for the new vacuum!), lots of table wiping, shoe straightening, timekeeping, spiffying, plant watering and pencil sharpening!  Leaving early one day, Ruby, concerned that her job wouldn't be done, took it upon herself to ask a friend to fill in!  So sweet!

It has been a remarkable beginning to the school year and I feel blessed each day that I get to spend teaching, learning and growing with your fabulous kiddos!  I'd like to leave you with a tip I learned  this week... 

If you are going to fly a paper airplane outside, be sure to check which way the wind is blowing!

India!

I hope you all got a chance to see your child's artwork on display at Traditions!  Such beautiful elephants of India!  And it was so much fun walking in the Procession of the Species together! 

Math
Measurement and fractions have been our focus the last couple of weeks. We played with finding the perimeter and area of shapes that we made on our geoboards.  We have measured so many things!  We found parts of our body that are an inch, 6 inches and a foot and then tried to find things around our room that had the same measurements.  The ruler had become a favorite tool in the classroom these days!

We have been using our pattern blocks, cuisinaire rods, food, our body and measuring cups with rice to help us understand fractions.  We are focusing on when a whole is fractioned into equal, fair pieces.  We have played with adding fractions by making a recipe and doubling or even tripling the recipe.   We played with subtracting fractions by eating parts of a cookie we cut into fractions. Math can be so yummy!

Literacy
We have been working on our ending blends, such as -mp, -nk, and -nd.  We had to give -nk and-ng special attention as when they babysit baby "i" and "a" they think they are such the cutest babies ever and pick them up, which changes our baby sounds!  "I" will say "eeee" and "a"will say "ay."

In reading workshop, we have practiced the reading strategy of flipping the vowel sound to help us read a word.  Sometimes when we sound out a word we end up with a nonsense word, but if we flip the sound (either make the vowel long or short) we may find that we make a word!

Compound words have been fun to play with as we create bigger words with two smaller words.  Check out our wall of illustrated compound words!

Theme
We are in love with the elephants of India!  It has been interesting to learn a bit about the Indian elephants and how they are different from African elephants.  We read that the Indian elephant's ear is a lot like the shape of India - we thought that was a really neat fact!

We were so lucky to have a visit from Liv Monroe who lived in India for six months and had so many wonderful things to share with us.  We learned about what men and women wear and the differences in various parts of India.  We even got to try on a beautiful sari!  After sharing her slides and dishes from India, she showed us the trick of eating rice with our hands - there is a trick to it!

We have begun to learn a bit about Hinduism since 3/4 of the population are Hindu.  Check out our beautiful OM symbols on our door.  We enjoyed hearing the story of Ganesh and seeing the pictures of Shiva, Parvati and some of the other gods.

We have also learned a few facts about the Taj Mahal.  Check out our incredible drawings as we kept in mind the symmetry and shapes of this beautiful palace.  We then took our artistic liberty in coloring it in vibrant colors that we liked (thinking about using shades of one color or two or adding on a contrasting accent color).

Yoga - A note from Lisa!
We usually spend the first hour practicing our breathing poses to help relax our amygdala's or energize our brains, then we work on our yoga poses. Typically we start our routine together and then the kids put together a yoga story uses poses of their choice and present their stories to the group while they lead us through the routine/story they put together. The second hour is usually spent focusing on kindness and optimism. We often read a book and discuss the lessons learned then spend some time journaling and finish up with final relaxation and meditation.

Greek Pentathlon

Our OCS Olympians

We had such a wonderful time in Ancient Greece!  We wrapped up our studies with a traditional pentathlon, an Ancient Greek photo booth (pillars, chiton and all), and a Greek feast of olives, hummus, figs, pita, tzatziki, grape juice, a yummy dessert, and a puppet show performance of our Aesop fable .  Here are some photos of the pentathlon...

For the long jump, a hopping course.

For the wrestling event, we hooped!

Running Event

For the javelin event, a bag toss.

Discus Event

Math

We have been working so hard subtracting, taking away, "minusing" that when we had that oh so glorious sunny day a week or so ago, I just had to take the kids outside to practice some mental subtraction math.  Some chalk, two rocks and we were ready to go!

Sunny day = outside math!

We will continue to practice our subtraction the rest of the year though we needed to take some time away from all our numerical reasoning and do some spatial reasoning. Being in Ancient Egypt will give us the perfect opportunity to learn about pyramids and other 3-D shapes!  First, we are focusing on 2-D shapes and the attributes of polygons.  We had fun learning that the names of shapes have their origins in Greek and their names correspond to their number of sides. Everyone has been practicing the word "quadrilateral." What a mouthful!

To build our spatial skills, we have been manipulating, folding and constructing shapes.  We discovered how a square can be folded into many difference shapes and how to make other shapes using pattern blocks or other shape pieces..  We used geoboards to discover properties of triangles and explore the idea of congruency.  Next up, we will see what different shapes we can create with 4, 5, and 6 triangles (hexiamonds!) and then it off to the 3-D world!!

Literacy

We have been busy with our routines of word sorts on Mondays and then a quick word sort of the same words on Wednesdays.  We then choose a column of words with the same spelling pattern and try to use as many of the words possible to create a silly sentence.  They are pretty silly and strange!  We all continue practicing long vowel patterns, some focusing on magic "e" patterns while others incorporate two vowels go walking. 

Theme

Ancient Egypt!  We have been SO busy!  We first had to learn a bit about hieroglyphs since so much of what has been learned about ancient Egypt life was discovered when the Rosetta Stone helped break the hieroglyph code and revealed it all to us!  We then learned about the people of ancient Egypt from the Pharaoh and nobles to the farmers and slaves.  We learned why and how the pyramids were built and thoroughly enjoyed making sugar cube pyramids.  Learning about mummies was high on the list, so we learned the step by step process of mummification and experimented using different salts to mummify an apple.  We found some worked much better than others!  Check out our results in this weeks Thursday packet. 

This week we are focusing on the Nile river and why people chose to live near it and how much they depended on it for survival.  We will learn Nile facts, Nile animals (hippo and crocodile), how it was the superhighway of ancient Egypt, how the flooding provided nutrients for their crops, boat building and of course, the uses of papyrus that liked to grow near it.