The Blog is Back!

Dear Family,

We have had such a busy couple of weeks and are learning so much. This week, Mrs. Maggart was sure to keep her camera with her to document all of our exciting learning adventures. And guess what? We even got to get behind the camera this week, in the name of Science!

Each Monday, we start our morning by setting weekly goals for each subject area in our Leadership Journals. Mrs. Maggart also has learning goals for our class each week. She has started displaying them on our front board so we know what our goal is and what we should be learning in each subject.

Last week, we finished working through the Writing Process and learning all of the writing vocabulary writers use: revise, edit, conference, and publish. We finished publishing our first books!

Conferencing

We focused on poems this week in our Reading and Writing workshops. We started a collection of poems: poems that were silly, poems that were fiction and non-fiction, poems that were long, poems that were short, poems that rhymed, and poems with alliteration. We used a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast the stories we have been reading and modeling our writing after with the work of the poets. There were many different things that we saw were different about the two genres of writing as well as features that were the same.

We worked in our table groups to complete the Venn Diagram ourselves. Look at our synergy!

We really enjoyed reading and looking with our writers' eyes for rhyming words in poems and alliteration in poems. We even tried to write our own poems using our mentor poets' work as inspiration. Now, we are able to add "Poems" to our list of genres, or types of writing we can do, during our Writer's Workshop.



Synergizing to discover how stories and poems are similar and different so we can complete our Venn Diagram

Some of the rhyming words we heard in our poems

Our definition of "Alliteration"

Writing our OWN poems to add to our collection of poems in our special notebooks

In Math, we are working hard on daily problem solving focusing on addition. We call this time "Question of the Day." We also work with Mrs. Maggart in our math groups and we are all learning different strategies and math games to help us master our number sense and addition skills. We read a book for mathematicians and picked out all of the math words we heard.

Then, we leaned how to use a vocabulary map to define and learn about new words. Look at our vocabulary maps we completed using the different math words that we learned.

The math words we found

The Vocabulary Map we did as a class

The Vocabulary Maps we did in our table groups

For the past 2 weeks we have begun doing "Math Attack" in the afternoons. This is a time when we work with a buddy for the week to put our heads together and tackle a variation of math problems that focus on past skills and objectives that we have already learned in class like place value, building numbers, identifying odd and even numbers, and other objectives and skills. And guess what? These "Math Attack" activities come from...second grade! Think how ready we're going to be next year! And we are really impressing Mrs. Maggart with how hard we are working at being mathematicians, double-checking our work, using our math tools and strategies, and even challenging ourselves!

Two heads are better than one!

Using different tools and using different strategies

In Science, we learned about three forms of energy: heat, light, and sound. We explored a lot of different items and determined what kind of energy they use or produce.

We started off by exploring with light energy by figuring out how to make our flashlights work and then exploring what this type of energy could do. We could bend it, block it, and make it move and travel!

It works!

Check it out!

Fun with light energy!

We then read about heat energy and sound energy. We learned about vibrations and how heat is transferred from one object to another.

On our technology day, we used the laptops and learned how to use Microsoft Word to type, add clip art, and print a piece about our favorite toy and what type(s) of energy we think they use or produce.

We had a field day exploring different items Mrs. Maggart brought! We explored a blow dryer, an iron,  a toy car, alarm clocks, and even a camera.

When it came to exploring Mrs. Maggart's camera, she let us take over with it. It was only today when she went to post our blog that she got to see all of the pictures we took! Check out OUR picture taking skills!

We're a pretty great group of kids! :-)

Love,

EGGI Week!

Dear Family,

This week was Education Go Get It Week. We learned about some different colleges that we could go to one day and we learned about all of the reasons why getting a good education is so important. We even got to listen to two speakers tell us about two exciting careers that we could have one day. We learned that so many skills that we're practicing each and every day at school already are skills we will need one day when we pursue a career.

Mr. Santiago is a firefighter and he came to share with us all the details of his career. He talked to us about how important leadership is when you are a firefighter and all the ways he is a leader each and every day. He also shared with us some of his equipment that he is responsible for each day. He even talked about matter and how he uses his senses daily...just what we're learning about in Science!

We were such respectful listeners.

Mr. Santiago provided us with lots of pictures in his slideshow.

We were so interested in what he had to say!

He showed us all of the equipment he uses and is responsible for.

We also listened to Officer Pedron, a police officer, who came to share with us all of the details of a career as an officer. We learned so many interesting facts and even got to hold and observe a real life badge!

Getting to look at and hold a real badge!

Because both Officer Pedron and Mr. Santiago explained how important our studies are, we worked really hard in the classroom this week. In Writing, we learned a very fancy word - genres. We learned that there are many genres, or different kinds of writing that we can do when we are being writers.

We learned when is a good time to write a list and how helpful lists can be. We can make lists about things we do everyday or lists about topics that we care about.

We learned what is a good time to write a letter and what makes a letter such a special piece of writing.

We also started talking about the writing process. We learned that there are very special words that writer's use when we are working through the writing process. We know that we first think of a topic, then we write a draft which is when we do the best we can. We write drafts in our Writer's Notebooks and that is why our spelling is done the best we can using our dictionaries, sound cards, and stretching techniques to spell words that are "tricky." We know that drafts are not our final piece and we know that if we choose to publish a piece, it will need a lot of work. One part of the work we must do is to revise. Revise means to make our writing better and add more details. Mrs. Maggart wrote a story about our class going to hear Mr. Santiago speak and we helped her to revise it, or make it better. We read it over and over, looking for places to "plant our carrots" and add more details or missing words. Then, we practiced in our Writer's Notebooks revising stories.

In Science, we talked about changing the different forms of matter. We picked a solid, a liquid, and a gas. Then, we discussed at our table groups all of the ways we could change the properties of these forms of matter. We came up with some great ideas! We filled up a whole chart!

But scientists always test their ideas or theories. We did two labs this week. We decided to prove that we could change liquid. We decided that we could cool matter, or freeze it. We chose the liquids of juice, water, and salt water. Then, we decided that a freezer would change the temperature of these liquids. When we took them out their properties had changed! In fact, they had changed states of matter. Our liquids turned into solids!

Scientists always record their observations, predictions, and results.

Our 3 liquids before we changed their properties.

Now they are 3 solids!

Then, we decided we wanted to change solids. We wanted to change the temperature of a solid by melting it. We chose an ice cube. We predicted how long it would take us to change our solids. Then, we tried many different methods to melt our ice cubes while we timed how long it took for this change to occur. Finally, our cubes melted and we saw that we can change solids. We changed this solid into a liquid. Look at our graph and the time it took for us to melt our ice cubes!

We tried using our own body heat to melt the ice cubes.

We tried smashing the ice cubes to melt them.

We even tried the heat from the light bulbs in all of our classroom lamps.

We even tried running warm water over our ice cubes.

Our completed graph. Ask me how long it took my table group to melt our ice cubes.

We finished our week with a special parade put on by kindergarten: Community Helpers. Wow! We remembered when we did this parade only last year. It was neat to see how the kindergartners had dressed up like different community helpers. It gave us lots of ideas of what we can be when we grow up!

Love,