The Week of October 22

Upcoming Events

Last call for October book orders... 

 Just visit  https://clubs.scholastic.com and enter in LDRGD.  All orders will be due by Oct. 30^th. 

No School- Nov. 9/Teacher In-Service

International Festival Field Trip 

Nov. 30

More information about parent chaperones and times to come soon. Ms. Whitten, Ms. Thomas and I will be sending home a letter in kids' home-folders.

Morning Meeting Activity

This week we worked on comparing two items.  Each morning, I hid two things under a blanket in class. I gave descriptions of each item and the students had to figure out what they were. Then we used a Venn Diagram to record descriptive features of each item, how they were different and how they were the same! We compared pumpkins to apples, cat Peeps to ghost Peeps and fiction to nonfiction books. 

Readers' Workshop

This week in reading we finished up our first unit of study! We reflected on the skills and strategies we do well, and those that need continued work. We revisited elements of a fiction book by reading I Want That Nut  by Madeline Valentine. Students identified the setting of the story (time and place). Then we made our own posters showing our favorite scenes in the book. Students added character, problem and solution if they could. Later in the week, we began a new unit on nonfiction texts.

Writers' Workshop

The first and second graders continue to work on their small moments stories. This week, we worked on adding author's craft moves to make our stories more interesting. We added dialogue to our stories by adding thought bubbles. Students tried adding text to their writing and  used quotation marks. We used a funny picture prompt to think of things the characters would be saying... this was really fun! Students loved it.

Science

This week was a very productive week! On Friday, we finished our models by trying to make our box classroom totally dark. Students worked in small groups to complete this task. When building time was complete, we used my smartphone to stream a live movie of what it looked like inside a model classroom. We discovered that without light, we actually cannot see anything! We added to our summary table and talked about what we figured out. At this stage of development, students are still unsure about what "proof" or "evidence" means. Some students still say they can see in the dark, even though we have evidence that we all watched together... this is okay! We will continue to work together to prove we need light to see. Up next, we will notice how we use light to communicate with others. 

Math 

In math we have been working little by little on our Comprehensive Growth Assessment. This is a LNMUSD math assessment that is given at the beginning of the school year and at the end. This week we worked on a few pages a day and then did some fun math stations and Halloween flip books created by students! We also used some fun part/part/whole machines to help us notice and talk about how numbers can be broken into parts and then put back together to make a whole.