Buddies

We got together with our buddies, the first graders from Mrs. Sharpe's class. Together, we painted a wintry scene full of snowman using only paint and Q-tips. Please enjoy the pictures!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Week of December 10th

***I will be sending home the unit 3 math tests on Thursday. If students can bring the tests back by Friday, before we leave for winter break, I would really appreciate it! If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask!
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***Also, this time of the year is a busy one since we will be finishing up a few units before the break. If your child will not be in school on Friday, please send an email letting me know. This will help me plan accordingly! Thanks!
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Social Studies
Written by: Stacey

• We learned about our regions project and we learned about the rubric. We got to choose our topics for the project.
• We started researching our topic using books the next day. We all have a landmark, landform, waterway, and a natural resource to report on.
• On Thursday and Friday, we researched on computers.

Reading
Written by: Parsa, Keith

• The whole class learned how to turn headings into questions. This can help you find main idea of a section.
• Tuesday the class learned how to become experts on something and how to teach others about it.
• Wednesday, we learned that paraphrasing is when you put something in your own words. If you do this, it will help you remember the fact longer.
• Next, we learned how to move from the facts to bigger ideas. We read an article about a girl named Garana and how she is an Afghan refugee. There were lots of facts about her life but overall she had a hard life.

Writing
Written by:Derek, Tommy

• On Monday we planned our beginning, middle and end of our stories. We are going to give it to someone as a present.
• On Tuesday we wrote three different leads for our story and we picked one to use.
• On Wednesday we talked about the dialogue rules and we started to draft our stories.
• On Thursday we learned how to slow down are writing. We found the heart of our stories and that’s where we will slow down time.
• On Friday, we reviewed sensory details. We worked together as a class to revise boring sensory details.   

 

Math
Written by: Cassidy,

• On Monday we reviewed things we have done in this past unit like arrays, partial products and partial quotients for our test on Tuesday.
• On Tuesday, we had a  math test on what we learned.
• On Wednesday we started our new unit on measurement. We measured around the classroom to find benchmark measurements. We used the benchmark measurements to estimate the length of things in the classroom. Then we found the real length.
• On Thursday we made an anchor chart on the U.S standard versus the metric system. We also used our homework to come up with times when we estimate measurements or when we find the exact ones.  
• On Friday, we had a workshop with Logopaths, finding perimeter and an assessment with Mrs. Stygles where you have to measure the length of the classroom.

 

 

Art tomorrow!!!

Here is an friendly reminder for art class tomorrow from Mrs. Schaffner! 

Students will be painting/stenciling tomorrow with acrylic paints. These paints do not come out of clothes so I recommend wearing clothes that are not your favorite or best. I have only a limited number of smocks (5) available in the art room though a student may bring their own if they wish. 

Week of December 3rd

Social Studies
Written by: Tommy, Keith and Brien

• The class wrote a rough draft postcard from a location from their region. We did this to teach everyone about our region.
• We wrote our final copy of are postcard and put the picture and postcard together.
• We took notes on the natural resources from our regions in our notes packet.
• Today we took notes on the landmarks from our regions in our note packet with the rest of our regions group.

Reading
Written by: James,Annie,Derek

• On Monday we sorted interesting versus important ideas.
• Tuesday we pretended we were THIEVES using text features to predict and find the main idea of paragraphs.
• On Thursday we learned boxes and bullets and we found the main idea about Pompeii, which was fun to learn about.
• On Friday we did boxes and bullet to find the main idea of paragraphs from an article about Pearl Harbor and Japanese Internment Camps.

Writing
Written by: Stacey,Amy

• On Monday we worked on stretching out our dot and jots in our persuasive essay.
• On Tuesday we added transition words to our persuasive piece of writing.
• The next day we learned how to vary our sentence lengths.
• Our class revised, edited, and published our persuasive piece.
• Today we picked our personal narrative topic and some of us finished our persuasive essay.

Choosing a topic - Slice of the Pie

Math
Written by: Cassidy, Paris

• On Monday we practiced multiplication and discussed what it means to add zero in the powers of ten rules.
• On Tuesday we learned how to use doubles and halves with Mrs.Stygles and Mrs. Gillis
• On Wednesday we made our power of ten posters in groups of threes and fours. We solved multiplication with cluster problems in small groups.
• On Thursday we did a workshop of three stations. Station one was Ms.Herlihy with quotient cafe where we practiced partial quotients.The second station was with Mrs. Stygles’s where we worked in our math workbooks on counting around the class. Then we had some independent work to do with division.
• On Friday, we began reviewing for our math test, which is Tuesday, December 11th.

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Week of Nov. 26th

Note from Mrs. Stygles:
Recently, when the students have drafted the blog entries, I spent time after revising and editing their work. Ultimately, I'd love to revise and edit less and for you to provide feedback to them about their written entries. My goal is for students to become careful writers and to clarify ideas so their message is informative, yet clear. As you read the blog, please let your child know where you may have been confused or where they explained things really well. Knowing that they have a real authentic audience will help to inspire them to be more thoughtful writers. I appreciate your support!

Reading
Written by: Jack F!, Tyler!, Brenna!

• We learned about text features for example table of contents and glossary. It helped us understand the features more and anticipate what we were going to read about.   
• Thursday, we continued practicing anticipating what we’ll read about. We read an article about Native Americans building skyscrapers.
• On Friday, we talked about interesting ideas versus important ideas.

 

Social Studies
Written By:Amy, Paris, Tommy, Keith

• We browsed the northeast regions book to find nonfiction features and we also picked our regions.
• We found out our regions and read Chapter 1 in our region books and took notes. We tracked our thinking using sticky notes.
• The class read chapter 2 in their region books and tracked our thinking differently. We tracked our thinking by separating our stickies into important stickies and interesting stickies.
• We took notes on landforms and waterways with the rest of our regions group.

Math
Written by: Derek, Brien, Kaitlyn, Shane, Liam

• On Tuesday and Wednesday we learned partial quotients and we have a choice to do that strategy or the equations strategy.
• We learned how to make multiple towers where you measure someone with a paper roll. We skip counted by one number and found the multiples of ten. This helped up practice the powers of ten rule.
• The class did a workshop where half of the class did multiple towers and the other half worked on division problems with Mrs. Stygles.  

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Writing
Written by: Giana, Annie, Hallie, Parsa

• We wrote our persuasive essay this week.
• We reviewed how to go from dot and jots to sentences.
• We learned how to stretch out our dot and jots. For example: iPads would help us or we would benefit a lot if you purchased ipads for us since there are many great apps kids could use.  
• We also learned how to make our leads sound really good.

Week of 11th and 18th

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving break!!!

Reading
Written By: Brien, Jack C, James, Stacey, Giana

• On Tuesday, we learned about how our characters have motivations and struggles and how they deal with it.
• We learned to use percise language in our stickies to describe our characters.
• Today we learned that some authors repeat things that are small because they can be really important later in the story.
• We talked again about the objects or ideas that repeat and how they could really mean something bigger. When we read A Bad Case of Stripes, we learned that it wasn't really about her eating lima beans, it was about her being herself and liking lima beans even if other people don't.
• We wrapped up our theories unit and spied on ourselves as readers. We looked at the stickies that we made and sorted them to see which ones we're doing well and which ones we need to do more of and then we set new reading goals.

 

Writing
Written by: Tommy, Annie, Shane, Derek, and  Kaitlyn

• We learned how to write a business letter and how it is formated.
• We took our time and wrote our letter to a landmark or landform in the United States and requested information to use for our regions project.
• We revised and edited our letter.
• We typed our business letter and had a great time on the computers!!!
• We started our new persuasive unit and came up with topics about school that we can write about.
• We picked our topics and stated planning all the reasons to support our argument.
• We planned out the different paragraphs for our essay.

  

Math
Written by: Parsa, Liam, Paris, Hallie, Tyler

• We worked on division problems with remainders in our math work books.
• At the the end of the week we did a three day workshop with three stations.
• During the workshop, we played Big Array/Small Array, Missing Factors and division fun with Mrs. Stygles.   
• We practiced solving more division problems with remainders on Monday and Tuesday.
• Mrs. Stygles gave us a grocery store flyer and we had to plan our Thanksgiving dinner using calculators.

 

Social Studies
Written by: Keith, Cassidy, Amy, JackF, Brenna

• On Tuesday we learned about map scales. We practiced finding distances of places in the United States.
• The next day we reviewed geography vocabulary and practiced things like map scale.
• We did a map check in on everything we’ve learned.
• On Friday, we had a surprise States and Capitals Test.
• On Monday, we corrected the test to see what we need to study.
• We learned what the different regions of the United States are and colored a map to show the different regions. We also made states and capitals flashcards.