Week 31 in Review

Greetings from room 119!  Thank you to all of those who have already supported our Donor's Choose Project!  As of the time this blog was typed, we needed only $467 more to fund our project.  That may sound like a lot, but if you make a donation before May 8th, we will only need $233.50 more.  For quick directions on how to make a donation and have it matched dollar for dollar,  click HERE.

Of course had we already had our iPod Touches, many of us would have not been able to use them because we took on the challenge of "No Screens" week.  Some of us were so serious about this task that we turned out heads during the morning announcements and only listened.  We also didn't go to the computer lab for math this week and Mrs. D. didn't show us any videos to enhance what we were studying.  She was very proud of our willpower and can't wait to hear who succeeded in the task!

One thing we could have done at home instead of watching screens was write poems.  Many of us are choosing to do this in our free time.  This was the last week we 'officially' worked on poetry, though Mrs. D. has a feeling that many of us will continue to write poetry because we enjoyed it so much.  We loved sharing our poetry with others and many of them were so funny that we had others laughing out loud. Good writing has the ability to make you laugh and cry and we did a great job of getting others to laugh.

We were VERY excited to learn on Wednesday that would be having a new first grader come and learn with us.  Falun joined our class and the very next day we got to celebrate her seventh birthday! She is doing a great job learning our routines and all of room 119 is doing a great job embracing our newest member!

We didn't just have a new human join our classroom, we also had new insects! On Wednesday, Mrs. Doran told us that our caterpillars had arrived.  They are going to eat and eat just like the Eric Carle book, "The Hungry Caterpillar".  We enjoyed watching them eat and look forward to the metamorphosis that is to come! (STAY TUNED!)

We had a new student, new insects, Mrs. Doran testing some of us and to add one more 'different' thing into our routine, we had spring pictures.  We were the first class to get our pictures taken so hopefully we looked the same as we did when we left for school in the morning.  Mrs. D. got some sneak pics and thinks that our pictures are going to be cute.

We also joined the country in two other things this week... exercise and standing up to bullies!  The exercise thing we do often in room 119 (usually counting to five and doing other fun active songs) but we don't always talk about bullying.  Mrs. D. shared a book on our document camera about bullies and what we can do to help end bullying.

The book also talked about what a bystander is and how even if we are not a bully or being bullied directly, we can help stop the problem.  We had some great classroom conversations and later we signed a promise to be part of the solution to end bullying and read it in unison with our school on Friday morning.

We continued to learn more about liquids this week and helped cement the new vocabulary for some of the more difficult properties (like transparent and viscous) by playing "Go Fish" and "Memory" games.

In Reader's Workshop, we revisited retelling a story.  We worked as a class to write a summary of a book that Mrs. D. read us.  Later we practiced orally retelling a book we read during our workshop time.  We are learning that we have to add details to make sure others understand what a book was about.  We love to share!

And finally we ended the week the way we love to... with a Mystery Reader!  Vasu was very surprised when he learned that his mom had come to be our special reader.  She read a great book called, "Today I Feel Silly." That reminded us that we can feel different from day to day, or moment to moment.  Thank you for reading to us!

And as always, Mrs. D. took a lot of pictures this week that you can find in the slide show below.
Have a great week!

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