29 more days of school!

In Spanish last week, the kids learned a little song with Maestra Cormack about rain. The song has such a catchy tune that the kids were singing it all week long. This upcoming week, Maestra won’t be coming in on the usual scheduled Monday. Instead, we will have Spanish Friday this week.

We have welcomed lots of new living things in our classroom lately. Calvin brought in a polliwog he caught at the creek over the weekend and we have received guppies and snails from the AISD science department. Sadly, our polliwog didn’t survive for long. L It was still so cool and SO BIG!!! The kids have been fascinated in catching lady bugs at recess so we made a little home for the lady bugs too.

This week we continued learning about life cycles. We did the life cycle of a chicken and life cycle of a fish.

The previous week, we learned about perimeter and area. The kids seemed to really catch on quickly. They should be able to tell you that perimeter is the distance around a shape and area is the amount of space inside a shape. We made robots and found the area of its head, arm, leg, and body.

Our fraction caterpillar!

 On Monday, Mrs. McClung subbed for me as I tested. The kids started the unit of fractions with Mrs. McClung. They worked with their bilingual buddy to find the fraction of each color in a Skittles bag.

Wednesday was EARTH DAY! We did many fun activities in my class and Mrs. Skalaban’s class. The kids worked with their partner to make up as many words as they could using the letters P-L-A-N-E-T E-A-R-T-H. We also read The Lorax and did a fun writing activity. The Lorax is one of my favorite books to read and one of my favorite movies.

In Mrs. Skalaban’s class, they have been talking about fairy tales and folktales. Some of them had some really funny writing about the characters in some of the books they read this week.

 Last week in VLA, we worked on the blending sounds of TH and NH. This week was KH and GI.

 We are coming to an end to April. We counted during math today and we only have 29 more days of school left. Time is flying by. For the month of May, there will be a “May fun” calendar included in your child’s daily folder. Each day will have a fun theme.

Library is this upcoming Tuesday!

Science buddies will be Wednesday!

Please turn in the green letter I sent home by this Friday if you have not.

Also, thank you for all who donated money towards Mrs. Richey's gift basket. She said she loved it and was so overwhelmed with everything we gave her. I forgot to take a picture.

Austin Nature Center, Measuring Capacity, and Learning About Frogs!

This week was a very exhausting week. I think I took a nap every single day after work this week. As the end of the year gets closer, our schedule will get busier…and more fun! I will start my testing this upcoming week with the kids for their end of the year reading level. 

I created some new math centers for the students that I introduced this week. They seemed to have really enjoyed them. If you have any extra Easter eggs or any empty cereal boxes, please send them my way! I can reuse these to make math centers in class.

We worked on measuring capacity and with a scale using non-standard measuring tools in our class this week. The kids really had a lot of fun with this unit.

We found out that 388 unifix cubes could fit in the Goldfish container! And yes, we sat there and counted up to 388 in Vietnamese altogether. It felt like FOREVER. lol.

I asked the kids to get misc. things around the classroom for me to weigh on our scale. After finding an object, we put it on the scale to see how many unifix cubes equaled the weight of our object.

I gave the students their own scale to weigh misc. things in the classroom to weigh with their bilingual buddy. They got really excited during this activity that it got really loud and I had to remind them to keep their voices down because Mrs. Skalaban was trying to give them their soundcheck next door. I’m glad they had fun though.

We made our own measuring scale looking for pictures in magazines. We learned that when an object is heavy, the scale goes down. When the object is light, the scale goes up. A student referred this to as a “seesaw.” Good observation J

In Spanish, the kids learned this rain poem with Mrs. Cormack. They made this which I decided to hang up in the room. Now the students are exposed to Spanish, English, and Vietnamese in the classroom.

In science, we learned about frogs. We brainstormed what frogs look like, what they can do, what they eat, and what they have. Then we  made these super cute little frogs in class with our facts inside our frogs. We also learned about the frog life cycle!

Here are some pictures of our field trip on Wednesday.  This was a very educational field trip. I hope the kids had lots of fun. Ask your child what they learned! Thank you for all the parents who came to join us! 

We finally earned our ROOT BEER FLOAT party! The next party they voted for will be a PJ and movie party.

April Fool's!

 It’s April! We had lots of tests on campus this week from STAAR to TELPAS  and the kids did a pretty good job being quiet in the hallways. Here are the huge hearts we made for our science buddies that I hung up in the 5^th grade commons for some encouragement.

In math, we practiced measuring length. We learned the correct ways such as no overlaps, our measuring tools have to be straight in order to get the correct answer, and it needs to start at the same starting point. In front of our class, we have a display of our shoes from shortest to longest. This activity included some giggles and laughs and was very enjoyable. Believe it or not, I don’t have the longest feet size. There are first graders who have longer/bigger feet than me! ;-/ We even made a class book measuring our hand with unifix cubes to compare hand sizes in the class.

We worked with measuring tools such as paper clips, unifix cubes, and rulers.

We have been learning about different categories of animals and their different characteristics. We learned about amphibians, reptiles, mammals, animal coverings, herbivores, carnivores, omnivores…

Here is what Mrs. Skalaban's class came up with when sorting out herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores. I'm not the best artist. lol

FIELD TRIP TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY! Mrs. Skalaban’s class is going from 9:00-1:00 on Tuesday. Our class will be going from 9:00-11:00 on Wednesday and we will have a picnic for lunch at school. Please make sure your child wears their class tie-dye shirts! Also, please wear tennis shoes and sunscreen since we will be walking around the Austin Nature Center.

I was thinking that the reading level assessment for the end of the year was starting in May but it's actually starting next week! Keep reading, reading, reading at home! They need to be on level 16 to be on grade level.

Animal Body Coverings and Shaping up 3D Style

In Math this week, we started and ended our lesson on 3D shapes. We have wrapped up our shape lessons and are moving on to measurement for the next 2 weeks. We will first start off with measuring length and then we will continue measuring capacity the following week.

 In science, we reviewed over basic needs of what all living things need to survive, living and non-living, and animal body coverings. The students love learning about animals and so they look forward to science every day. These are some vocabulary words we learned about:

Thú Vật Cần...- Animals Need...

Nước- Water

Đồ Ăn- Food

Không Khí- Air

Chổ Ở- Shelter

 Sống- Living

 Không Sống- Non-Living

Lông- Fur

Lông Chim- Feathers

Vẩy- Scales

Khác- Something Different

Next week, our upper grades will testing for their STAAR tests. We need to be extra extra quiet in the hallways. We made our fifth grade buddies little encouragement hearts for the test. It came out super cute. I forgot to take a picture of it so I’ll post a picture of it next week.

This upcoming week will only be a four day week because of Good Friday so the children will only have three pages of homework to do. I bet they will be super estatic about that. I can’t believe March is coming to an end and the end of the school year is right around the corner. Please make sure you are reading at home every day and asking your child reflecting questions about what they are reading. The EOY reading test is going to be assessed in May.

HAVE A GOOD WEEKEND EVERYONE!

Importance of Reading Every Day and Being Bilingual

I ran across these 2 articles and wanted to share. There’s a reason why Suzanne and I stress about reading every night with your child! Also, these bilingualism facts are pretty interesting J

Shapes and Parts of a Plant. Happy SPRING BREAK y'all!

Happy Spring Break everyone! I hope everyone has a fun and safe 9 days off.

In math this week, we learned about 2D shapes. I didn’t get to introduce 3D shapes because we didn’t have time but I plan on doing that when we get from Spring Break. The unit of shapes is always fun for kids to learn. In class we did a lot of fun hands on learning this week with shapes. Below are some pictures of activities we did this week. 

Góc= vetix/vertices (corners)

Cạnh= sides

The kids really caught on fast on learning about vertices and sides.

 This activity was trickier than it looked! As I was modeling to the kids this activity, I was having a little trouble. (Yes, even teachers don’t get things perfect the first time.) As the kids saw me try to figure this out, we talked about how sometimes in life we don’t get things perfect the first time and we have to keep on trying until we accomplish what we are trying to do. With this discussion, it prevented any potential meltdowns in class J

In science this week, we learned parts of a plant and what plants need to survive.

 Cây Cần= Plants Need

Air= Không Khí

Food= Đồ Ăn (We talked about how a plant’s food is the sun)

Water= Nước

Soil/Dirt =Đất

Look at these cute flowers!

 Bộ Phận của Cây= Parts of a Plant

Bông Hoa= Flower

Lá =Leaf

Thân Cây =Stem

Rễ =Roots

We had science buddies outside this week with our 5^th graders. Our fabulous 5^th graders were kind enough to teach us about filtering water. The kids have really bonded with their 5th grade buddies. 

On Tuesday, our orange crew had our 1^st grade folk dance. The kids did such a great job. The kids have been practicing for months now. What really impressed me was that they were learning the entire dance steps for their folk dance PLUUUUS all their dance choreography for the Tết show at the same time. Good job kids! We had lots of proud parents and teachers! Parents, please keep these tie-die shirts. We will be wearing them on April 8^th for our last field trip of the year to the Austin Nature Center.

Graphing and Shapes

We finished up our unit of graphing this week. We worked on bar graphs, pictographs, and answering specific questions about our graph. I’m very proud that the kids are able to read graphing math questions in Vietnamese because that is something that is not very easy. We are incorporating math, reading, and Vietnamese all in one. 

We had a very funky schedule this week with an “ice” day on Thursday and taking class time out for dance practice 3 times this week. The kids did good adjusting and being flexible. With an ice day on Thursday, we will have to make up that day on May 22^nd.

We started our unit on 2D shapes today. In my opinion, learning shapes in English is much easier than learning shapes in Vietnamese. As you can see in the chart below that we have in class, a shape in English is only one word but in Vietnamese, it’s like 2 or 3 different words. We will do lots of hands-on learning this upcoming week on shapes, both 2D and 3D. 

We didn’t get through our 6 new sight words in Vietnamese Language Arts this week like I was planning so we will continue with these 6 words this upcoming week before Spring Break. We are working on the G and GH sounds. One more week until Spring Break!!!