Seals, Sharks, Whales...Oh My!

Dear Family,

This week was an exciting one! We started the week welcoming back one of our dear friends, Wadi. Wadi has been learning from home because last year, he was diagnosed with cancer. He is such a brave guy and we have missed him so much. We had a very special speaker come visit us and explain exactly what Wadi has been through with his treatement. She brought a special doll to show us and we got to watch a Charlie Brown video as well.

With the end of March, we hung up our "March Words".

Then, we brainstormed some "April Words" for this great month! We use these words to help us get ideas for writing topics during our independent writing time during Writer's Workshop. We can use these ideas to write poems, stories, nonfiction pieces, letters, and even lists! We always start with a read aloud to get our ideas going. Here is the silly story we read for this month:

This week, we had more published authors who shared their published books with us.

We always remember to show our great illustrations!

We have finished studying media in our Reader's Circle. We have explored and investigated magazines, newspapers, radio programs, websites, television, and advertisements. We have discovered the different purposes of each as well as their special characterisitics. Ask me what my favorite form of media was! Now we will begin our research so that we can begin our next project: writing an expository piece on a topic we want to learn more about.

Just a few of the large charts we completed after we completed our own charts by exploring and investigating each form of media.

We have completed our unit on fractions and sets. Here is a poster we created to hang on our "math line" so we can continue to work on this objective on our Math Attacks and Quick Checks that we do each day during Math. Being mathematicians is a lot of work!

In Science, we have been studying interdependence and how living things depend on one another, espeically for survival. Each table drew a card with a word written on it. We worked together to create this object on our papers. Then, we talked about how these things were all connected, how each depended on the other. Look at what we created - a food chain!

Working together to create our posters.

Putting our heads together...

Look how they are all connected!

The next day, we planned a dinner party! We each drew a different guest card. These were no ordinary guests...we had frogs, lions, fish, birds...oh my! We then had to plan a meal for them and create it on our dinner plates. We even used PebbleGo and Google Kids to research what we could serve out guests. It was fun going around and visiting all of hte dinner parties to see what everyone had planned for dinner!

We read a literary nonfiction piece about how interdependence occurs in the ocean.

We created a graphic organizer of the food chain that was in the story.

Then, we worked with our groups to research different food chains. We created a plan and then made "stacking cups" of our food chains.

We then presented them to the class.

We had fun practicing with each other's stacking cups to see if we could put the food chains in the correct order!

What a terrific week!

Love,
Tiger Team

Tiger Team Had Some Chicks....

Dear Family,

With the beginning of our Science unit of living and nonliving, interdependence, and the studies of different species of animals, we had an arrival of one dozen chicken eggs. For twenty-one days we kept them at a constant 99 degrees in our incubator, turned them 3 times a day, and tracked their growth and progress on a calendar.

Finally, a few small holes appeared. We waited anxiously all day for our eggs to hatch. It wasn't until everyone went home and the school was quiet did 7 of our chicks hatch! We were so excited the next morning. We had already named one because of the "freckles" on the egg shell - Freckles!

Soon, we had 4 more chicks hatch! We had a blast naming them and making a sharing circle so that we could hold them, pet them, and love on our little pets!

Our newly hatched chicks!

They even took a nap while we held them.

On our chicks' last day with us, Mrs. Germain sent us a wonderful surprise! She had made cupcakes that looked like...EGGS!!! We LOVED our delicious treat. What a great way to "send off" our chicks!

Look how yummy our "eggs" were!

Love,

Tiger Team

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,