Winding down for the month of October...

It’s been awhile since I have updated this class blog. My schedule has been super busy with events outside of school lately.

In math, we have practicing skip counting, basic addition, adding doubles, and a little bit of place value. We will continue learning about place value and then move on to our unit on counting money.

We did one of my favorite lessons 2 weeks ago on doubling. We read the book “Two of Everything.” The kids really enjoyed the book. I put it onto our book shelf so they could read it and it’s been a hit. After reading the book, we made our own “doubling pot!”

We worked with our bilingual buddy for the first time on an activity this week and it went really well. We did not have any arguing. For bilingual buddy, each person in the group shares an activity paper and have their own colored pencil. The different colored pencils show me who is writing down what and contributing to the work. They are responsible to work together by teaching and learning from one another. For this week, they worked on fact family.

We did another doubling activity towards the end of the week using mirrors. We discussed that when we have a “double,” there is two of whatever it is. In math one day, we rolled a die and whatever number we landed on, we took out that many hippos. We then put the mirror up facing towards our hippos and saw double of it. The kids had fun with this one.

Our Halloween party will be this Friday at 1:30-2:15. If you would like to help, please let me know! There are a couple more slots to sign up if you would to contribute an item for our party! It is the orange paper outside of our classroom door. This will be our first classroom party. How exciting!

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!

This week was one crazy but busy week. The kids did a really good job adapting to the off schedule. This week we had Spanish, library, an extra day of computer lab to type out our farm animal riddles, and Fun Friday in the afternoon. Mrs. Skalaban’s class and my class switched early on Wednesday because we needed to catch up with our afternoon class since we have been having events that occur during the afternoon class.

 This week, we focused on skip counting by 2’s, 5’s, and 10’s. We completed different activities to practice this skill. Their favorite one was when we did our ice cream skip counting. Parents, please continue to practice these skills with your child at home. During the 2^nd nine weeks of school, we will be starting our money unit and skip counting will be a major skill that will help your child be able to count coins.

 We got a new gecko lizard this week as our classroom pet. The gecko has not came out fully yet for the kids to see but I did manage to catch this photo of him after school before leaving work tonight.

In VLA, we are continuing to practice 6 sight words each week. I am noticing how neat their handwriting and pictures are improving in just these last couple of weeks.

In science this week, we learned that matter can change  to different phases. I put some ice cubes(solid) in a little container. We did our Vietnamese work and came back 40 minutes later to observe that the ice cubes melted and changed into a liquid. We recorded a picture of our observation.

 Dowser Dan came a little earlier this year and made a little visit to Summitt. He taught us about the water cycle and ways to conserve water. He sung different songs and had different little skits with many characters. Ask your child to tell you what they learned from Dowser Dan!

In Mrs. Skalaban’s class, the children have been presenting their fabulous “All About Me” project. We had some cool posters, books, and mobiles. We even had our first little video made. You can check out the kids’ projects hung outside of our classroom. Below is sweet Izzie’s video for your entertainment! So cute!

Hope everyone has a great 3 day weekend!

Don’t forget to pack a lunch for your child on Wednesday (Oct. 15th) due to the special guest performer Jose Orozco. We will be missing our scheduled lunch so mostly likely we will eat beforehand in the classroom.

It's October!

 We had our 3^rd Spanish lesson on Monday with Maestra Cormack. The kiddos learned about different body parts in Spanish and even learned a catchy song to help them remember how to say the different parts in Spanish. The class seemed to have really enjoyed this lesson.

I introduced these little 100’s chart and number resource page to the kids this week. They keep it in their math journals and use it whenever they need it. We did a lot of basic addition and subtraction up to 20 this week. We also worked on finding missing addends which was a hard concept for the students to grasp. Please continue to work on these skills at home with your child for more fluency! You can even practice in the car while on the way to school!

 In VLA, the students seem to be getting adjusted to the routine. Every day (or at least we TRY) we sit in a circle to work on our Vietnamese sight words. We write the word, think of a sentence to write as a class, and draw a picture to associate it with our word. Then later in the week, we make flashcards of our words and write sentences in our VLA journals using our words. We will try to start using things from our Tomathien curriculum hopefully in November sometime.

 This week, we are still on the unit of matter. We learned the three states of matter and this upcoming week, we will be learning the phases of matter. (Freezing and melting) We had our first Science Buddies experience this week and the kids were so excited! There were 2 first grade class and 1 5^th grade class crammed in one room. It was a complete organized chaos in there. As a teacher, big messes in the classroom are what we try to prevent and when I saw all the cornstarch everywhere on the table, the floor, and on the kids’ clothes and even in their HAIR, it kind of made me want to go crazy inside. Lol. Bottom line is... the kids had fun and learned how to make oobleck which tied into our matter unit. Oobleck can look like it can be magically liquid or solid..at the same time! The 5^th grade buddies were awesome with our little first graders. The students were already asking me when the next time we will be returning back right after we left the 5^th graders. Please make sure the kids don’t wear anything too nice on the days we have Science Buddies. I would hate them to get their clothes ruined or stained.
Thank you for all the parents who donated cornstarch to the class!

 Check out some of their awesome independent writing in Vietnamese.

 We had our first guidance lesson with Kelso the frog from our fabulous counselor, Mrs. Stogdill. She will be visiting us every Thursday afternoon for a couple of months.

If you have not returned the letter regarding participation for our New Years show, please do so by Friday. We need to get costumes ordered soon! Thank you!