Week 29 in Review

Greetings from room 119! Although it was a short week with the Good Friday holiday, it was one that was jam-packed with learning and fun! We had many reasons to celebrate this week and two of them were for our friends, Sarah and Steven, who had birthdays. They turned seven on the SAME day! We had fun celebrating our friends!

We also dove head first into poetry! April is poetry month but because we were finishing up our autobiographies, we didn't get to learning about poetry until now! We've been learning about all different types of poems. We learned that not all poems rhyme (as many of us thought). We tried out many forms of poems in our writer's notebook and Mrs. D. displayed some of our poetry in the hallway. We did a great job on our shape poems. Shape poems are where the words you write look like a shape. For these poems, we wrote about things we love and wrote them in the shape of a heart! We also wrote rain poems where many of us used "repeating" phrases like we've heard in some poems. We put them on raindrops and Mrs. D. hung them from the ceiling in the hall.

Poems use interesting words and many adjectives. To help us with acrostic poems, we brainstormed "describing" words (adjectives) from A-Z. An acrostic poem uses the first letter of each line to spell a word vertically. We came up with many different adjectives for each letter and then we helped Mrs. D. write an acrostic poem using her name. Mrs. D. pointed out that the adjectives we use should describe what we are writing about. For example, "married" was one of our adjectives but it could not be used in any of OUR names because none of us are married.Mrs. D. told us she would laminate our work and put it in the hallway for everyone to see. We were excited and got right to work! While meeting with us she noticed that many of us chose the word "evil" to describe us, rather than something like "exciting" or "energetic". Mrs. D. had to again explain that we should choose words that describe ourselves. Many of us assured Mrs. D. that our word choice was accurate because while we are not 'evil' at school, we can be at our homes. We then confessed all the bad choices we have made at home so that we could keep 'evil' in our names. Mrs. D. respected how we defended our writing and got a chuckle out of some of our stories and how important we thought it was to keep our words. Mrs. D. can't wait for you to see all of our hard work!
Of course, much of our day is also spent reading. During one Reader's Workshop this week, Mrs. D. shared an ABC book she recently purchased all about bugs. After the page about the fly, Jaidan got so excited! He went right to his book box and showed us why! While many of us were learning new facts about bugs, he knew all about the fly from a book he recently read. He flipped to the page and showed us the comparison! This is one way to make text-to-text connections!

We also practice our reading each day. Our stamina is now reading around 30 minutes independently and 10 minutes with our buddies! With some of us, Mrs. Doran has really been stressing the importance of fluency. Fluency is the way we sound when we read and our goal is to sound fluent like we sound when we talk. To do this takes PRACTICE! Zane practiced one of his books 4 times before Mrs. D. met with him one day and she was so impressed with how his fluency improved and so was he! The more we read the better we will become at it!

We review money every day and it was easy this week because our school was bringing in coins each day to help support our local Hospitality House. We practiced counting the different amount of coins and raised over $58.00 from our class! As a school, we raised over $1800.00! We learned not only lessons in math but lessons in helping our community. We also worked a lot with fractions this week! We did really well and learned how to divide shapes into halves, thirds and fourths.

We also experimented with finding fractions in a set! To help us with this we used manipulatives. Having taught the higher grades, Mrs. Doran could see what we needed to know now to help us build a solid foundation for what is to come! We did many problems and all thought that fractions were quite easy and a lot of fun!!

There are two religious holidays this week that many of us celebrate! We learned a little bit about the history of why the Jewish people celebrate Passover and why Christians celebrate Easter. We also learned some of the traditions that each group uses in their celebrations!

Finally, Good Friday is also Earth Day this year so we learned a lot about the 3 R's- Recycling, Reducing and Reusing (a day early)! April 22nd is Earth Day and Mrs. D. shared with us what her family does each year. They find an area that has garbage, take some bags and go clean! They then recycle what they can and make sure the rest of the garbage is cleaned up. Many of us thought that this was a great idea and thought about areas near our house that we would like to clean up with our family.

To show us how easy this really is, Mrs. D. grabbed a trash bag and we went out on our playground to see if we could find anything. We didn't think we would find much, but we did! We found cans, bottles, food wrappings and even some old toys. Many of the items could be recycled and one student found a barrette that he thought could be cleaned off and reused by someone! Mrs. D. can't wait to hear what activities our families did to help the earth! Enjoy the pictures below! Spring has finally sprung!! (We hope!)

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