The Week in Review!

From the desk of Mrs. Schmidt...

It’s hard to believe that this is my last blog entry!!!  Where has the time gone?!?  It has been such a pleasure to teach your children this first trimester!  They are incredible individuals with wonderful and fun personalities!  It has been a blast, and I know that they will be in GREAT hands with Miss O’Sullivan!!!  Thanks for all of your support and warm welcome back to Dryden!!!

We focused on Realistic Fiction this week as we read “There’s Nothing Like Baseball,” making inferences about the characters and events as we read with our buddies.  Again, the emphasis was on combining our own background knowledge  with what we read in the text to draw conclusions about the story.  In our guided reading groups, we also read Realistic Fiction selections making sure to have stopping points in the stories to visualize what we were reading as well as to make predictions about what was to come.  Using the context of the stories, we tried to incorporate some grammar rules such as using quotation marks, pronouns, and past-tense verbs.  We love to use our highlighters to help us locate information!

To apply what we learned about the format of friendly letters, we wrote letters to Officer Romag at the Arlington Heights Police Department, thanking her for showing us around the police station and sharing information about her job on our recent field trip.  Again, the focus was on including the proper elements of a letter, such as a heading, greeting, body of a letter, and closing.  As a follow-up to our letter writing lessons, we wrote letters to Miss O’Sullivan, introducing ourselves so that she can get to know us better!

In math, we took a Trimester Assessment of all that we have learned so far this year.  This will be shared with you at conferences.   For our lessons this week, we have worked on solving number stories to find parts and totals for the presented problem.  We also measured temperatures using thermometers and solved temperature problems.

At LMC this week, we concluded our U.S. President research. Using the Pixie Program, we imported a picture of our chosen President on to Mt. Rushmore. Then, we tried to write convincing reasons that this person should be included on this national landmark.  The children utilized a lot of computer skills such as dragging and dropping images, creating text boxes, and working with font and color for this project.  Their work will be on display in the hall at conferences.  

We continue to work on our Citizenship Unit.  This week we learned about important patriotic symbols such as the American Flag, Liberty Bell, and bald eagle.  We compared these to our state of Illinois symbols, such as the violet for the state flower and the cardinal for the state bird.  Our future discussions will be what makes a good citizen.

Up & Coming

*Tuesday, November 11-Veterans’ Day-school is in session.  Mrs. Schmidt’s last day!

*Wednesday, November 12-Miss O’Sullivan returns!

*Friday, November 14-Dads & Donuts at 8:30 am in the Commons.

Mrs. O'Kelly explaining how to input their President research into the Pixie Program at the LMC