2014 Tết Show: The Year of the Horse!

It’s finally here! Our Tết performance is done being edited and is now officially on AISD TV. Click on the link to view the show.

http://aisdtv.blogspot.com/2014/04/tet-vietnamese-new-year-2014-year-of.html

 

We've got the whole world in our hands...

We celebrated Earth Day this week by reading the Lorax with a writing activity, made some Earth men and picked up trash outside around the school, and other writing activities in Mrs. Skalaban’s class.

The kids sure were a bunch of chatty, wiggly worms this week. I am in the process of completing the TPRI testing and I am so happy to see how much some of the kids have improved. Please continue reading with your child because I still need to do the DRA with them, which will determine the reading level. They need to be at a level 16 to be on grade level!

On Friday, we had our last robotics lesson for the year and some people from Junior Achievement from UT come teach the class about the community. The children completed a book with the Junior Achievement instructors that were placed in their daily folders.

In Vietnamese Language Arts, we have not completed our weekly packet for this week. This week we worked on TH and NH words. Last week we worked on NG and and NGH sounds. Last week's NG and NGH words were a little tricky. Even for my Vietnamese students just because it's a hard sound to articulate. Vietnamese blends and English blends are pretty similar but the NG and NGH is not a common one that is used.

I will not be at Spring Fling today. I have a baby shower and 2 birthdays to attend. But for those who do go, have a fun time and make sure you bid on a basket!

Silly Quote of the Week:

H: “Cô Tracy, why is your feet brown?”

Me: I looked down at my feet thinking he meant I had something brown stuck on my feet.

“What’s brown?”

H: “Your feet.”

Me: “What do you mean?”

H: “Why is the skin color on your feet brown?”

Sunny recess = tanned feet

Off we go to the Austin Science Nature Center!

Thursday’s field trip was very fascinating not only for the kids but also for me! I learned a lot about animals that I never knew before. It was a really cool field trip because it was a lot of hands-on. The children got to feel all sorts of animals from different types of birds’ feathers, a twisted tail lizard, a box turtle, a snake, a ferret, and a big fluffy bunny! Our yellow crew traveled to 3 different rooms to look at mammals, birds, and reptiles.

It's very impressive how the kids showed off to our tour guide, Daniel, all the things we learned this week about animals. What smart cookies they are!

 

Did you know the reason why a box turtle has its name is because when an enemy is near; the turtle can hide in its shell and use a part of its bottom part by its head to close off the shell as a shield? It boxes out predators.

Also, you can predict the age of a turtle by looking at the number of rings on its shell.

4 Day Week -- Yippy!

This week definitely flew by.

We’ve been so busy in class that I’ve been coming home and taking 2 hour naps every day. I even took a 4 hour nap one day last week! I can’t believe I’m updating our class blog at 2:00AM. I can’t fall back to sleep and had the urge to update our blog since I didn’t have time to do one last week.

 

This week we will not have robotics since Fridays are our robotics day and we don’t have school. Last week, the kiddos worked together to build a “twirling bird” with multiple lego pieces from a kit. They did SOOO well looking at the manual to assemble the product together. I’m not going to lie, I had to really think and pay attention to the steps when trying to help some of them out. A lot of them were much faster when coming to build the “twirling bird” than me.

TA-DA!!! This is the finished product.

When hooked up into the computer, it is supposed to spin.

 

 

In science, we focused on different categories of animals since we went on a field trip today. We read fun books and generated a class anchor chart. The students were just so interested this week especially because animals are always so fun to learn about.

The left side is from my homeroom and the right side is from Mrs. Skalaban's afternoon class.

 

We just wrapped up our measuring unit in math. We learned about measuring area, length, temperature, weight, and capacity within the last 2 weeks. We’ve been using less of our math spirals and more of the envision. I chose envision because it has colorful visuals I thought the kids would enjoy. The children practice these envision papers with their math partner and then on the last day of the week, they take an assessment over what we have learned.

 

 

Marivilla’s mom, Charline, did such a great job on our Spring Fling basket! Thank you for everyone who put in a donation towards our basket and a big thanks to Charline for putting our awesome basket together!

The Spring Fling fundraiser supports Ms. Barbara Neill, our wonderful computer teacher!

 

Silly Quote of the Week

I was reading them a read aloud about mammals and we were discussing about how all mammals have hair.

E: “Even humans are mammals even if we are balding.”

April Fool's Week

 

We got through the first week of April. Looking at my calendar this week, I realized we only have about 2 more months of this school year to complete. Time sure flies by quick. As the year comes closer to an end, it only means our schedule will get more busy and fun!

This week, my homeroom class earned their root beer float party. My afternoon class just earned their dance party, which we will be celebrating sometime next week. For the month of March, our class and Mrs. Farnsworth’s class won the perfect attendance award. Mrs. Farnsworth’s class had 99.1% and we had 99.4%. Out of the whole month of March, there was only one day that 2 students were absent. Pretty impressive I must say. Mrs. Cummings came by and rewarded us with an ice cream cone party. Delicious!

We spent about 2 days learning different bones in our skeletal system. The kiddos really enjoyed this activity.

In math, we focued on measuring lengths of different things around the classroom with paper clips and cubes. We also used different body parts. We agreed that when we measure:

-We don't leave any gaps

-Start at the beginning and stop at the end

-Put the paper clips or cubes close to the object we are measuring

-Make sure the the paper clips or cubes are straight

-No overlaps

At the beginning of the week as a class, we were trying to find "big foot" in the class. We traced our shoe, cut it out, and compared the sizes of our feet from shortest to longest. As a result, we found out that my foot was as big as a first graders :-/ Students were fascinated by this big piece of butcher paper hanging up on our math wall and would come meausre some of the feet with a ruler during math center.

Các em đo giày- Measuring the sizes of our shoes

Ngắ́n Nhất- Shortest

Dài Nhất- Longest

Silly Quote of the Week:

L: “What happens when you tell an egg a joke? It cracks up!"

I will be sending home a field trip permission slip this upcoming Monday for our next trip on April 17^th. Please return it by April 10th.

Thanks for those who sent in supplies!