
Happy Wednesday families! Can you believe it is already week 3?! I so enjoy this wonderful class - it makes me a bit sad that I only get to see them two days a week!!
This week we had some amazing learning opportunities. We continued to solidify our morning routines by starting each day with morning warm-up activities and calm music, followed by our morning meetings. This week, we added goal setting to our morning meetings. You can find your students first individual goals in the "Career" section of their binders!
On Monday, we started a unit on place value. We dove into the world of manipulatives and did some whole-class, as well as partner, work to solidify our understanding of creating digits with base-10 blocks and determining the value of already creating blocks. I was very impressed by the class's level of understanding!
In language arts, we completed our writing assessments. This was a great way for me to see the students' ability to print neatly, write sentences, create a story, add details, and spell words correctly. It was wonderful to see the creativity in the class! Next, we had the opportunity to share our identity bags. Each student was so proud to share about their identity and culture, and the rest of the class really enjoyed learning about and connecting with each other. We followed our sharing time with a read aloud of the book "Boys and Girls of the World", which highlighted different cultures all over the world. We had a meaningful discussion about acceptance for all people!
Our afternoon was fun, as we continued our learning on life cycles by looking at the life cycle of salmon. We watched a fun video, discussed that it is a non-metamorphic life cycle, and completed an activity. Finally, we finished our day with a trip to the library. A great Monday, if you ask me!
After our morning routine on Tuesday, we continued with our learning of place value. Today we solidified our learning with manipulatives and the students had a chance to create their own numbers and try to challenge their peers! We finished the lesson by creating some paper manipulatives for at home practice.
Language arts on Tuesday was all about making connections to the stories we are reading. We read a book titled "A Family, is a Family, is a Family" and practiced making connections by placing sticky notes on pages with which we connected. We will continue to practice and expand on this concept in the coming weeks.
After some more learning about salmon life cycles, the class got to enjoy some iPad time where they navigated a fun, educational app called "ToonTastic". This app allows students to create multi-part stories complete with settings, characters, dialogue, and more. This fun app then compiles all the "scenes" together to create a seamless movie. The class was so intrigued by this app and I could see their creativity blossoming!

We finished the day off with obstacle course races in P.E., and the beginning of an art activity comprised of a self portrait which will later connect to our social studies concept of identity and culture.
I hope you students had as much fun as I did these past two days! Have a great rest of the week and a great Thanksgiving. Gobble gobble!
I love being able to see what the class does :) - Diane (Amanda's mom)