Art Show

The children have been doing some truly impressive work in art this year!  Here is their artwork that is currently hanging up in the hallway.  I apologize that the names are small, but I'm sure your child can point out his/her artwork to you.  What creative artists we have!

  

Grandpal's Day

What a treat it was to welcome the Grandpals into our classroom and into our school!  The children loved showing their Grandpals around the school and introducing them to their classmates and teachers.  It was a pleasure to see such wide smiles on the children when their Grandpals walked through the door.

SCE TV

There was another fabulous show this morning by four of our classmates: http://goo.gl/2IsKA

Verbs

Here are some ways that your child can review for the test on Wednesday:

Watch this School House Rock video and see how many verbs you can list that you hear:

Try these worksheets to practice past, present and future verbs:
http://www.abcteach.com/free/g/grammar_simpleverbtenses.pdf

This worksheet works on past, present and future verbs as well as identifying verbs and nouns.  This is a great one to practice a variety of skills:
http://www.edhelper.com/language/verbs4734.html

This game practices subject and verb agreement:
http://www.gotkidsgames.com/sv/sv.html

Week 14

It is amazing how quickly the time has flown!  Thanksgiving is just over a week away!  Our Grandpal's are coming this Friday!  Please let me know if your child does not have a Grandpal and I will try to find one for him/her!

Reading: This week we are continuing to read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe together as we look for details in the text that we can use to make inferences about the characters.  We will also be talking about some "Signposts" this week that we, as readers, need to pay attention to when we come across them in our reading.  Such as: Contrast and Contradictions (when a character does something unexpected that contradicts with what we know about the character) and Aha Moments (when a character has a revelation). Our vocabulary words this week come from chapter 3 of the book and I think you can tell just by the words that it won't be the happiest of chapters: stern, miserable, hoax, sneer, spiteful, occasion, wretched, vanish, gilded and merely.

Spelling: The compound words this week are not necessarily difficult to spell, but the tricky part will be remembering if it is one word, two, or joined by a hyphen.

Language: This week we will be wrapping up our study of verbs and will have a test on Wednesday.  The students will need to be able to list and identify verbs as well identify if the words are in past, present or future tense.  Students will also need to be able to provide different forms of the same verb for different tenses (such as flew, fly and will fly) and choose the correct form of a verb so that the subject and verb agree.

Math: We are finishing up our multiplication menu this week and beginning to work on double digit multiplication.  Ask your child about some of the challenging problems he/she has solved in the last week and a half.

Alabama History: We will be discussing the French and Indian War and the beginning of the American Revolution.

Science: This week we are investigating how force plays a part in making objects move.

CNN Student News

Speaking of news programs... this year, our class has been enjoying watching CNN Student News.  It is a ten minute show with quick headlines from around the world all in kid-friendly terms with good explanations.  The children love hearing more about the news events they have heard about and they always have insightful questions showing great curiosity about the happenings in the world around them.

The link is updated each morning, so there is a new show each week day.  We usually only watch it once or twice a week, but it might be something that you and your kids would enjoy watching and discussing together.

http://www.cnn.com/studentnews/

SCE TV

As I am sure you have heard, our class is now doing SCE TV.  The kids will be acting as anchors, meteorologists, sports reporters, scientists and even leading crafts on the school wide TV show from now through the middle of January.  The TV show is taped on Thursday mornings so that the whole school can then watch the show on Friday mornings.  Today was the first day that some members of our class got to be on the show.  You can watch it on this link:

http://goo.gl/2IsKA

The Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe

Today, we started the classic story of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.  I know some of the students have read the book before or seen the movie, but I believe they will still thoroughly enjoy digger deeper into this classic.

To begin our study, we actually started with a history lesson.  Although the C.S. Lewis story is a fantasy story, it starts with a very real event nick-named "Operation Pied Piper."  Last year, my eyes were opened to the horror that the British faced during WWII as they were so close to the front lines.  I must admit that I had been quite naive as to how involved they were.  In 1939, the citizens of London and the other large cities were evacuated of over 3 million children as they feared bombs would destroy the large cities.  The children were sent off to homes where they did not know their host families and were sometimes separated from their brothers and sisters.

Talk with your child to learn more about this historic event which is the start for this great story.  The students were in awe this morning and full of inquiries about this event.

Dotty

Dotty is going through her transformation! It should take 3-12 days, but as we found her as a pupa when we returned after the three day weekend, we don't know exactly how long she's been like this.

She's definitely looking much more like a ladybug than she did last week, but as this is a very fragile process, we are just all hoping for the best and hoping she's making it through alright!

Week 13

I hope that you all enjoyed a wonderful Veteran's Day with your family, enjoying the glorious weather we had before this cold snap!  Speaking of cold snap... as we enter into the winter months, it is still my intention to take the children outside for recess.  Of course if the temperatures are dangerously low, we will find something to do indoors, but please feel free to send your child to school with hat/gloves/scarf in his/her backpack!

Reading: This week we will be focusing on a few skills including making inferences about characters based on the text and using text features such as photographs, titles and subheadings to better our understanding of nonfiction.  We will be starting The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe this week as a group read, so our vocabulary words are taken from the first chapter of this classic: evacuation, enormous, parcel, unexpected, wardrobe, stooping, splendid, inquisitive, glimpse.

Spelling: No spelling this week

Language: We are continuing our focus on verbs, particularly different tenses of verbs (present, future and past) and subject and verb agreement.

Math: This week we are working on a multiplication menu.  Through this menu, the children are investigating and learning how to multiply by multiples of 10 and multiply 2-digit times 2-digit numbers.  The children should all have their facts memorized by now; on Friday we will be taking a test on all the facts.

Science: This week the children will looking at how to carefully draw and label their vehicle so that someone could later copy it as well as design the basic car that we will be using for the majority of our experiments over the next month.

Alabama History: We finished talking about Alabama's first explorers today and will be moving into the French and Indian War later this week.  Trivia question: Do you know who fought in the French and Indian War?  The answer is not quite as easy as it may seem! :)

Today, with our Character Partners, we made mounds of cards to be sent to our service men and women to say thank you for all that they do for us.  The kids wrote very thoughtful notes that I know will help to brighten someone's day.  Thank you to Denise Williams and the Lindamood Bell organization for getting us involved in this great project!

Greg Tang Game

Several years ago, I heard a math author, yes, a math author, speak at a conference.  Greg Tang has written books such as The Grapes of Math, Math Appeal, and Math Fables.  He was a whole lot of fun and taught us a simple little game that I have passed on to the students.  It is complicated to explain, but as the children now understand it, I have no doubt, they can explain it to you!

The idea is that you can take any five numbers to create another number and it always works - except if you used all 1s.

Take these numbers for example:
7
5   3   2   9   4

Use the numbers on the bottom to create the 7. You can add, multiply, subtract or divide. You must use all five numbers and any numbers you create. If you do it right, you will end up with four equations and chances are there are a wide variety of ways you can solve the problem.  Here is one example:

2 + 9 = 11
11 + 4 = 15
15 - 5 = 10
10 - 3 = 7

Use any single digit numbers to create your own game!  See who in your house can find the most solutions!  Good luck!

Mary Celeste

Today we read a fascinating story about a true mystery from history: a ship who's crew seems to have disappeared!  The year was 1872 and the ship left abandoned was called the Mary Celeste.  Your children were in awe and quickly created their own theories about what might have happened to the crew.  Let them tell you more about the mystery.

I was told that there was a recent PBS special about the Mary Celeste and what actually happened, but I have been unsuccessful when searching for it.

Vocabulary

The children have been using an app called Popplet to make word webs about their vocabulary words. These webs show true understanding and real creativity! I just had to share some of these!