March 1, 2024

Preschool

Kindergarten

We really enjoyed playing outside on the warm and sunny days this week! During show and tell, we focused on teaching others about our item that we brought to school. We enjoyed teaching the class!

We started BOOK BLAST this week and it has been a BLAST earning prizes! We are excited for the new books!

We have started our Author and Illustrator Study about Dr. Seuss. We have been dressing-up to match the Dr. Seuss book we are studying.

Please check out the pictures from this week!

1st grade

first graders learned about leap year. We created a little poster about ourselves today and what age we will be on the next leap year in 2028. We even took mini-Polaroid pictures of ourselves for our posters. We are including these in our end of the year portfolios.

2nd grade

Mrs. Rawling’s class has been working so hard this week practicing and preparing for IREAD 3. We continued learning how to count money and we were even able to solve money word problems.

Second Graders have been working hard this week! We love having our IU students here to help us in the classroom. We have been working hard on finishing our Opinion Writing books, learning all about money and time in math, celebrating and learning about Leap Day/Year. We also started creating our Me Tree’s learning how to think about our Hopes/Dreams, Challenges, Strengths and Values as we relate them to our RIASEC code.

3rd grade

Mrs. Ely:

We continue to work on our Informational Reports. We are learning that it takes quite a bit of research and planning for these reports! This week we have also been practicing and reviewing for iREAD 3. I am so proud of these kids! They are doing wonderful! Just as a reminder, we will be taking iREAD on Monday and Tuesday of next week. We will be testing in the mornings. Please be sure that your student comes to school well rested and on time. Thank you so much!

It’s been a great week in third grade! We have spent a lot of time preparing for our upcoming iread test! We are going to rock that test!

In writing, we wrote our introduction and conclusion for our informational reports. In math, we are learning about fractions. We are looking forward to spring break and gearing up for the last nine weeks of the school year!

4th grade

This week we have been focusing on decimals and fractions on a number line. We also have been working on solving word problems using numberless problems.

We are continuing to read nonfiction, and we are using the Fab 4 Reading Strategies to deepen our understanding of nonfiction. We are answering questions that require us to infer and require us to find the central idea. We are also reading biographies and learning all about the elements of this genre.

In “Why Try”, we reviewed our visual metaphor of geese flying in a “V”. We reminded ourselves of all that we learned about geese last week. We thought back on all the ways they support each other. We watched an awesome video about a talent show try-out and a beautiful act of friendship. We also did an activity where we ended up leaving people out (that is how the activity was created), and we talked about how it felt to be included and to be left out.

We have been loving the hints of Spring, and we’re ready for warmer weather!

5th grade

FIfth graders are working hard to stay focused and engaged. In LA, students are completing a novel, and will have a choice board to complete a final project. Rules for using commas, quotation marks, colons, and semicolons are being learned and practiced. Morphology continues to help students identify word meanings, and the students skills in combining the roots, prefixes and suffixes into new words continues to grow.

Our Math unit on dividing and multiplying fractions is drawing to a close, and two student “guest speakers” made slide presentations to introduce two new topics: mean, median, mode, range and outliers was the first, and the second student introduced polygons.

Social Studies is a favorite subject as we begin learning about the Revolutionary War. Our IU nurses visited this week and tackled our Second Steps lesson on interpersonal problems. Students identified specific problems and worked on problem solving to find the best and most effective solution.

It has been a great week in Fifth Grade!

Science

Scientist of the Week: Juniper Coulter

This week in science…

Fifth grade students constructed an explanation about a surprising phenomenon: the existence of underground water. In the activity, Wanted: A Well, students played a game in which they must obtain and combine information about groundwater in order to select the best site to build a town. They evaluated the features of the landscape, plants in the area, and clues from the soil and then decided where to dig a well.

Fourth grade students discovered that sound is a wave. In the activity, Making Waves, students drew the waves that different sounds make using a virtual oscilloscope, a machine that shows images of sound waves. Then they vibrated a rope to make waves that look like the ones made by the oscilloscope.

Third grade students discovered why dogs’ expressions, like tail wagging, are so useful when living in a pack. In the activity, Field Journal, students watched videos of different animals that live in groups to simulate observing them in their natural habitats. They discussed and recorded their observations, and constructed an explanation of how living in groups helps these animals survive.

Second grade students learned about a unique building material: mud! The properties of mud depend on the properties of the soil it’s made from. In the activity, Mystery Mud, students used models of sand and clay soils to investigate how the properties of soils can differ. They used their observations as evidence to classify each soil model based on whether or not it would make mud that’s good for building.

First grade students gathered observations of the Sun from a single location. They saw that the Sun follows a repeating pattern in its apparent motion, and then used that pattern to predict the location of the Sun at various times of day in the future.

Kindergarten students learned why spring is the best time for babies to be born.