December 1 - 5

On Monday afternoon Gabi and Jose (Camila's parents) came in to make ginger ale with the class. 

Using a very easy recipe available online we made four flavors: plain, grapefruit, lime, and jasmine tea.  On Wednesday afternoon the class voted on which one they liked the best.

Jose and Gabi also brought in a microscope and let the class look at the yeast cells under it. They talked about how the yeast are alive and eat the sugar in the ginger ale recipe, producing a gas that gives the drink bubbles and makes the plastic bottles hard to squeeze after a little time.

The class really enjoyed the experience and seemed to learn a lot.  You can read their reflections on the experience in the picture above (each students' initials are in parentheses next to their dictated sentence).

At a recent workshop I learned about many online audio reading resources, including Storyline which has members of the Screen Actor's Guild doing (somewhat dramatic) read alouds of classic children's books.  Captions along the bottom let your child read along, too.  It is a fun way to share a love of reading with your family without having to make a trip to the library!

This week in math we learned some new math games and practiced telling time to the hour (o'clock) and half hour (half-past __ o'clock) with our new life-sized clock!  Soon we will study quarter-past and quarter-til times on an analog clock.

We practiced reading to ourselves this week and talked a lot about why that is important (it makes us better readers and is fun)!  We came up with many ideas about what reading to ourselves should look, feel, and sound like, and practiced for short amounts of time.  We will slowly build up our stamina to help develop our independent reading skills.  I am sending home a hardcopy of the list of expectations we made so you can help your child practice at home, too.

Our carpet measured 201 unifix cubes long!  The carpet has been established as a special place for listening and learning.  Next week we will begin sharing in our morning meeting circle on the carpet.  This will be a time to talk about things that are going on in the students' lives and should help them develop public speaking, listening, and story-telling skills.  This is not a classic "show and tell" as the emphasis is on talking more than bringing in special items, but it is OK to bring a picture or small memento to help tell the story.  We will use a sign to chart what kinds of information people share in a story: feelings, who, what, where, why, when, and how.  Sharing will be an optional activity for the first several weeks, but eventually I want everyone to participate.  We will devise a schedule next week for what days students will be scheduled to share (if they want to) and I will send home a copy of that.

*** Next week's sight words are: know, make, old, thing, other  ***