Making Ginger Ale

Insects

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  ***

Photos from late November

November 24 - 25

I'm sad to report that Zoe Liz will be moving away from Ithaca to live with her father over Thanksgiving break and will go to a different school.  We made her a good-bye book this week and we will write her letters in December.  We hope she enjoys her new school and that she will stay in touch with our class.  We will miss her but we will not forget her!

We celebrated Camila's birthday on Monday when her family brought in a special snack for the class.  We also started making snowflakes to replace the leaves on our classroom windows, sorted words, numbers and pictures associated with pennies, nickels and dimes, and we traced the letters to spell the words of the week: put, said, with, your, jump.

On Tuesday we read a book about spiders and made a paper spider to take home.  Please discuss with your child how spiders differ from insects (for example, spiders have two body parts and eight legs while insects have three body parts and six legs...).

This week we have been editing and illustrating thank you letters to people in our lives in preparation for Thanksgiving.  Please look for these important letters to come home on Tuesday. Pictures of each student with their letter and a recording of them reading their letter will be posted here in early December.

Thank you for all you've done to make this year a success so far.  I'm so grateful that everyone made time to have a conference with me and for both listening and communicating so well.  I really appreciate how much support and time you have offered me both in and out of school.

Enjoy the break and I'll see you on December 1st!

Class Picture

Back row: Richie, Ms. Provan, Bessie. Students standing: Geoffrey, Isabelle, Angelo, Sam, Willem. Students sitting in chairs: Sophia, Mea, Bethany, Morgan, Leila, Camila. Students sitting on the floor: Abigail, Narea, Zoe Liz, Zoe G., Seneca

The individual student pictures will be sent home on Friday. Retakes are next Tuesday so if you are not satisfied please return the original picture to school on Monday and complete a retake order form (available at the front desk or I can send one home with your child on Monday).

November 17 - 21

On Friday I will be out of town and Richie will be with the class. That morning we will have a guest speaker from Cornell's Entomology Department discuss aquatic insects with our class. We will conclude our study of insects this month with some activities on spiders (and how they are different than insects). Next month we will move into a unit on motion and balance.

I forgot to mention earlier that our author study this month is Mo Willems. The class was quick to notice that his last name is almost the same as Willem's first name, and many recognized his popular Knuffle Bunny and Piggie and Elephant books! The students have enjoyed noticing details he uses in his illustrations and typography that reflect how the characters are feeling and make connections between his various books. I encourage you to check out some of his books next time you visit the library. We have also begun reading aloud My Father's Dragon each day to practice reading skills like predicting, inferring, and recalling.

We began writing thank you letters this week in preparation for Thanksgiving. In early December I plan to publish a digital picture of the letters with a recording of each student reading his/her letter aloud and describing his/her picture and motivation for writing the letter on this website through Voicethread. We will also use Voicethread to share recordings of student explanations of and reactions to some of the digital pictures I've taken of various classroom activities. I plan to record some of the music, art, PE and library classes in the coming weeks and post short videos of those on here for you, too.

This week in math we introduced dimes and practiced exchanging pennies and nickels for dimes. The class did a really nice job with this activity both when they saw pictures of the coins and when they saw symbols for the coins (P for penny, N for nickel, and D for dime). To further challenge your child, try playing "banker" and have them trade in various amounts of pennies and nickels for dimes, or vice versa. Thanks to everybody who read the homework carefully and contributed 10 dimes for use in the classroom!

Leila's Mom shared some neat online math resources with me that I wanted to share with you all, too: 1. virtual math manipulatives (especially helpful for your child to explore base 10 blocks, something not found in most households but used in 1st and 2nd grade, with you)

2. telling time on an analog clock (warning: this crashed for me in Firefox but worked well in Internet

Explorer and Safari)

Miss Lupo (the Health student teacher from SUNY Cortland) concluded her lessons with our class this week by discussing germs and the many ways HIV cannot be spread. As a follow-up I read the Magic School Bus book "Inside Ralphie, A Book About Germs" which the class really got into. This book does a nice job illustrating why it's important to protect yourself from germs, how white blood cells attack germs, and why rest and medicine help you recover faster when you do get sick. The story is also available as a video and Scholastic offers online games and resources for fans of the Magic School Bus series.

Next week I will publish on here and send home a hardcopy of the December snack calendar. Let me know if you need to switch days. Please make your best effort to provide healthy snacks for our class. Popular options include baby carrots with ranch dressing, granola bars, muffins, trail mix, string cheese, and any kind of fruit. We have a refrigerator available across the hall and you are welcome to send in snack a few days in advance if needed.

We have been using the American Sign Language alphabet to fingerspell words we are studying, which has sparked a lot of interest in sign language. I will begin incorporating more signs into our regular activities and using the ASLpro online video dictionary to answer their questions about how to sign words I don't know.

I will begin sending home (optional) word study activities once or twice a week. The one I'm sending home this week involves cutting out letters to rearrange into words or names, and then recording the words on the paper. Please keep the letters at home and simply return the list of words. You can support your child with this by encouraging him/her to make rhyming words and to look at the latest sight word list for ideas!

Next week (and continued through the first week in December)
we will study the words:

jump, put, said, with, your

P.S. Comments are enabled and welcomed on here if you click on the post title (e.g. "November 17 - 21" for this post). I am still working out the kinks in the html code to make a comment link appear in each post footer. Thanks for reading!