January 12, 2024

Preschool

Our first STUDENT OF THE WEEK! She was so excited to pick something from the Treasure Chest!

We have been watching the movie Leo for the last ~15 min of the day! Today we finished it and drew pictures of Leo the lizard!

We’ve really been getting into to circle time and talking about the weather! I’m so proud of them!!

We made some snazzy bracelets as a class and had a great time! We got a close look at snowflakes and learned about where they come from too! On Friday we had hat day! We ended Friday with a very serious game of Candy Land!!

Kindergarten

1st grade

First graders started reading the Snowmen at Night book series. One of the books, Snowmen at Work, explores different jobs the snowmen could do. We connected this to our RIASEC code and chose a career the students were interested in. They filled out a job application that told why this job would be a good fit for them. They also had to list personal experiences or qualifications they have for this career. We used our letters and put their individual codes on the ledge while they held their completed job application. They all turned out FANTASTIC!

2nd grade

Second graders came back from break. Excited to get back into school and ready to learn. We hit the ground, running in math and are continuing working on subtracting two digit numbers and learning how to decompose numbers. We love reading and growing our reading skills. As writers, we are learning about writing an opinion/persuasive paper this nine weeks. We’ve been talking about our RIASEC codes, jobs that go along with the letters and what our codes mean to us.

3rd grade

Mrs. Ely: We are back in full swing in third grade! We started the week with a classroom Spelling Bee! Congratulations to our winners! They will be in the schoolwide Spelling Bee on Tuesday. We have enjoyed inside recess this week as well although we would rather be outside! We have been reflecting on our first semester accomplishments and setting goals for the second semester. We also revisited our RIASEC codes to see if they have changed.

Mrs. Stiles: We have been learning a lot about animals in third grade.

We got our first update on our cow since she’s been born. Lucy weighs over 200 pounds now! She is now four months old and is living in her own cow hutch.

In writing we are starting our informational reports about animals. We will be studying our animals’ life cycles, habitats, physical and behavioral adaptations. In math we are studying area. We will be creating an area zoo projectect sometime this nine weeks.

4th grade

4th Grade is back in full swing!

In World of Work, we continued on with our “Artistic” project this week. We worked in our research groups to read back over all of our facts, reactions, and questions about our world issue. We then wrote possible thesis statements for our persuasive essay that will be about our issue.

In Math, we began learning all about fractions. We are learning how to use multiplication and division to find equivalent fractions.

In reading, we are learning all about historical fiction. We are back in book clubs reading lots of historical fiction books. It has been a busy, wonderful week!

5th grade

Fifth graders were excited to be back and ready to begin their final leg of elementary school! So many exciting events will take place this semester, including BizTown and our Night at the Wax Museum!

Math this week finds our students using fraction tiles to find benchmark numbers, adding and subtracting unlike fractions, and reducing fractions to their lowest terms.

In ELA, students are learning the morphemes tele-, auto-, photo-, and -graph. Students are also writing a persuasive essay, identifying figurative language, and trying their hand at poetry!

Students are gathering information on characters as they read, in order to draw inferences in several types of genres. Students are also working to identify and use figurative language both in their reading and writing.

In Social Studies, students are finishing up a unit on Explorers and are ready to begin their study of colonial times in America. Students also created illustrated definitions for our new unit vocabulary!

We are all happy to be back and learning!

Science

Scientist of the Week: Ricky Nichols

This week in Science…

Students in grades K-5 have begun coding! Each grade has a specific course they are completing through code.org. Our kindergarteners got a little extra help getting started from their 5th grade friends!

Students are also completing unplugged coding activities such as designing mazes, creating their own sprites, and writing messages using binary code.

The science bowl team started their experiment this week. Students are investigating the effect of varying salt concentrations on seed
germination. They prepared a standard stock solution of salt and then made serial dilutions of the stock to create other solutions of known concentrations. Radish seeds will be grown between paper towels dampened with the various solutions in plastic baggies taped to a window. They will check for progress next week.

Vex Robotics Team

Our Vex Robotics team is busy building their robots for the upcoming competitions. In addition to the competition on January 27th, we will also be competing with other elementary schools on February 10th. We are so excited to showcase the skills and creativity of our talented students in these competitions!

Speech

New year! New train set! New language skills!

PE

This week in PE we have been getting back into the swing of moving our bodies! Winter break was nice but, it feels good to be back in our routine! This first full week back we played some intense games of rock/paper/scissors tag, and cops and robbers! Cops and Robbers is such a fun way to work up a sweat, use teamwork and strategy!

Due to the weather, we were stuck inside for recess most days this week. So during PE we had a few minutes of free time at the end of class to be able to move and use our imaginations. It’s so fun to watch how kids choose to be active when given the freedom to choose!