Weekly Update!

Hello!

Thank you for visiting the blog and reading about our week at school. It certainly was a full few days!

* The children had their school photos taken on Monday

* We took our field trip to the Arlington Heights Historical Museum, the Arlington Heights Memorial Library, and North School Park for lunch. It was such a beautiful day! The children were very well behaved, fantastic listeners, and took so much from this authentic learning experience! I hope you were able to get a feel for our day by viewing the photos in our field trip slideshow. Thank you to Mrs. Geisler, Mrs. Walsh and Mrs. Erickson for coming along!

* Congratulations to the

Erickson family!! They are the winners of our classroom project, "Family Game Night!" They were so excited to receive the box full of items for a night of family fun at the Progressive Dinner on Friday. Mrs. Erickson sent in this adorable photo of one very happy Lily! Congratulations!! Thank you all for participating, I understand it was a wonderful event and a prosperous fundraiser for our school.

Spelling

We worked this week on words that have the short and long /o/ sound. Next week we will have a review week, and the children will be taking a reading assessment covering all of the reading and writing skills we covered in Unit 1.

Reading

The common theme to our literacy activities this week was “Coming to America.” We kick off every new theme building our background knowledge by talking about the topic. New oral vocabulary words include: custom, journey, liberty, greet and varied. We talked a lot this week about immigrants who come to America- including the reasons they may come here as well as the customs they bring along with them. Our whole group story was called, “My Name is Yoon.” It was about a little girl who moved to America from Korea. Our comprehension strategy was making predictions, so the children paused throughout the story to think about what was going to happen next. All of the children met with their small guided reading groups as well. Each group read from the genre of historical fiction. We learned that historical fiction is a story that was created by the author based on historical events. In our guided reading groups we focused further on this genre, we practiced our decoding strategies, and we noticed our weekly vocabulary words! Our new vocabulary words from this week included: cuddle, favorite, patient, practiced, settled, and wrinkled. The children also worked this week to identify words with inflected verb endings. We noticed that the ‘ed’ and ‘ing’ at the end of words give us information about when the word is taking place- in the past or in the present!

Grammar

The children practiced identifying compound subjects and predicates, as well as combining sentences to create them on their own. We also worked to identify and incorporate quotations marks into sentences!

Math

After focusing on our +9 math facts, the children have been memorizing their numbers that "make a ten." (1+9, 2+8, 3+7, 4+6, 5+5) This particular skill will come in handy when adding two digit numbers! We went on to practice fact families this week, through the use of dominoes and fact triangles. The children were quick to see that each fact family has 2 addition and two subtraction facts! We practiced writing subtraction story problems based on these fact families, making sure to include a unit box (something to count) and a number model (equation).

Social Studies

The children reviewed that people require food, clothing and shelter for survival. We discussed how the area we live in now was once a vast prairie inhabited by the Potowatomi Indians. The children learned many different ways they used the land to survive- building their wigwams out of bendable branches and covering them with bark; hunting, gathering and cultivating food from the land, and even making their clothing out of animal skin and decorating it with feathers and quills. We learned that they created trails by traveling the same path over time, and eventually we paved those trails into our present-day roads and highways. (Did you know that Arlington Heights Road was once Potowatomi Trail?) We were also learned how the settlers moved into the area, forcing the Potowatomi to move west of the Mississippi River due to the Indian Removal Act of 1830. We were happy to know they left peacefully and were given a small amount of money. Finally, the children learned what it was like to travel in a covered wagon. We learned about dangers on the trail, the best location in the wagon train, and what would happen if the settlers encountered a steep hill, mountain, or even a river they had to cross. The children have begun "packing" their own covered wagons and illustrating life on the trail. They will write about their work next week as we learn about the early settlers that rolled into Arlington Heights in the late 1800s.

The children were each given an Arlington Heights Landmark to learn about during our time in the LMC! As an added challenge, take a picture of your child (or your family!) in the location of that landmark today- whether it is still there or not! You can email them to me (kosullivan@sd25.org) and we will add them to the children's research podcasts!

Field Trip to the Arlington Heights Police Department

Thank you for returning your field trip permission slips so quickly for our upcoming trip to the Arlington Heights Police Department! There is so much to learn about while studying our town, we are happy to have another authentic learning opportunity "in the field" on this upcoming trip. Please send in the permission slip if you haven't yet done so! And thank you to those of you that volunteered to come along! I understand we have 6 parent chaperones. I will send a reminder note home a few days before the trip, but please arrive to school by 12:50 on October 21st. We will leave promptly at 1:00!

I hope you are enjoying this beautiful weekend!

Happy Columbus Day!

:) Miss O'Sullivan