September 21

The class enjoyed celebrating Talk Like a Pirate Day last Friday. In honor of this day, during center time, the students looked through pirate books to find sentences and identify subjects and predicates, and they rewrote nursery rhymes to make them more pirate-y. Several of the students read the rewritten rhymes afterwards in excellent pirate voices.

We also have had the privilege of a police officer coming to talk to the class about how to avoid gangs and bullying and what to do if you see anything violent happening. The program is called GREAT, and he will be coming every Monday.

We will have our social studies test tomorrow (Tuesday), as well as a science test on Thursday, covering classification, vertebrates, invertebrates, fish, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and instincts. Because of the tests this week, we will not have a spelling unit.

Several students have been rushing through bellwork and not finding all the mistakes, but I want to recognize the students who got a hundred percent this past week: Wilfredo, Mason, and Mia. Good work!

September 14, 2009

On September 11, we had a special activity to commemorate the events that happened 8 years ago. The class read a non-fiction book about a fireboat that was used to fight the fires, then we discussed the events together. Afterwards, the students glued a star onto a blue piece of paper and wrote a prayer on it. These papers will be combined with prayers from grades 3 through 8 to create an American flag in the hallway that shows our reflections on the terrorist attacks.

This week, students will continue to use their classifying skills in science as we discuss characteristics of the different animal groups. They will learn about QAR, or question-answer relationships, which looks at whether a person needs to look in the book or use thier own knowledge to answer a question, and can help students find the answer. They are also going to finish working on their first paragraphs that have been through all five steps of the writing process, and they will begin looking at sentence structure and the different types of sentences.

We have a spelling test this Friday. There will also be a social studies test next week on the history of the US through the American Revolution. I will pass out a study guide for the test on Thursday and show the students how to study using the study guide. Right now, I have the test planned for Tuesday, September 22, but that date may be pushed back depending on how long our review activities take.

New School Year

Welcome to the new year at St. Sylvester's! You can see in the pictures above the students working on their covers for their writers' notebooks, which they have been adding entries to ranging from challenges they faced to what they think about their name. There are also pictures of an experiment done in the first week of school. Students needed to manipulate variables to change the distance a "car" made out of index paper went, and at the end, the challenge was to make it go exactly the distance I gave the class.

In reading and writing, we've been studying why author's write, reading selections from picture books and non-fiction books. We'll begin reading Henry and Ribsy soon, while looking at predictions,connections, and questioning skills, while in writing, we'll take a paragraph through the five stages of the writing process. In science, the students are learning how to classify everything from alien slugs to shark teeth, then they'll be classifying animals into vertebrates, invertebrates, mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians. Social studies is focusing on the history of the US and sequencing skills, while in religion we're learning about the covenant and the first three commandments.