News for May 2

News for May 2

This week we went to the Book Fair in our school library. Mabel's Fables, a local bookstore,
set up a small store in the library and students could shop and buy books there.

The students worked hard on their writing challenge this week. The challenge was to write a story with the characters from the movie, A Grand Day Out, that the class watched last week. The students learned that if their stories happened before the movie, it is called a "prequel". If the stories happened after the movie ended, it is called a "sequel".

The children wrote a reflection on their cursive name art projects and of course, they wrote the words in cursive! The students were asked to think about what was easy and hard about doing the activity. Because the name art is also in reverse, the art reminded the students of things like skeletons and aliens. The finished art and writing assignments are now on display in the hallway outside of our classroom.

In math, the class finished the unit on probability. The children flipped coins, rolled dice, spun spinners and played games. They also worked very hard to use math language outside of math class. We tracked how many times the children said the words: certain, likely, equally likely, unlikely and impossible.

The students finished their country posters! The students will be sharing the information learned about all 20 countries with the rest of the class. We will be posting facts about these countries in a video, to be created next week.

The class began an activity, to improve hand-eye coordination, called Speed Stacking or Sport Stacking. After reading about the history of Speed Stacking during guided reading time, the students tried stacking cups themselves. It's not as easy as it seems! The children watched a DVD of a champion Speed Stacker to see some of her tips and tricks. Finally, each child had a chance to time his/herself using the official Speed Stacking competition timing mat.

Books read aloud this week:

Boy + Bot by Anne Dyckman
Lego Man In Space by Mara Shaughnessy
Rabbit & Robot by Cece Bell (short chapter book)
Sky Color by Peter H. Reynolds