Some proud American citizens!

It was so great to meet with everyone to discuss the children's progress during our parent teacher conferences last week. The children are so fortunate to have such interested and supportive families! We jumped right back into the swing of things at school. The only difference this week was we had a new friendly face in our classroom! We welcome Jaimie to our classroom and look forward to getting to know her better!

Thank you for all of your hard work with the children on their landmark projects. It was so much fun to see them take ownership of their learning and teach their peers all that they had learned. The children's projects added a whole new dimension to our citizenship unit!

Once all of the presentations were complete, we invited Mrs. Coyle and Mrs. Glaser's first grade class to a "Landmark Fair" in our classroom. Our students set up their projects, and the first graders walked through our classroom and stopped to listen to new facts from us!

During reading this week, we read a nonfiction piece called "Meet the Super Croc." We learned how to summarize a text by only sharing the main ideas, as opposed to retelling the entire story.

In order to enhance our vocabularies, we started a program called "Text Talk" this week as well. The story that anchored our lessons this week was The Bad Case of Stripes.  Our new words included: remedies, distraction, contagious, perplexed, altered, and vanished. The children were encouraged to use these words in their everyday dialogue as much as they could, and we tallied points next to each word as each one was used. Did your child tell you who our "Word Winner" was? It was distraction! It was fun to see the children's wheels turning as they worked to incorporate these words into their vocabularies. They did a great job!

During math, our lessons in Geometry have begun. The children learned about what a "point" is, and practiced clearly labeling a series of points with capital letters. Next they learned about what a "line segment" is. They connected two points to create a line segment, and noticed that the line segment could continue on in either direction. They labeled their line segments using the name of both points.  We went on to look for parallel lines all around our classroom. The children found the ceiling tiles, mailboxes, bookshelves, mini blinds, and hundreds chart all contained parallel lines! We learned that parallel lines will never ever cross.  The children also worked to build up their strength of their addition facts through a series of mad minutes and some daily practice with xtramath.org. Thank you for helping review those addition facts a few minutes at home each night too! Its so helpful as we apply those facts during daily lessons.


Our unit on Citizenship has come to an end. We reviewed key concepts on Friday morning and the children took their unit assessment. Coming up, the children will be learning a little bit about holidays around the world during the month of December.


Finally, we had our first star student presentation this week! Mia did a terrific job sharing an experiment called "Air Rocket" with the class. She showed them how she was able to use air pressure to propel a balloon taped to a string attached to two chairs -across the classroom. We were so happy to spend some time on Friday afternoon with Mia's mom and dad, her older sister Elise, and her grandma and grandpa too! Mia is a sweet, sparkly girl and we are so happy to have her in our class!

That's all for now! Thank you so much for your interest in our learning at school!
Have a great weekend!