Wow! Spring Break! I can’t believe the year is almost over, only 8 more Friday's. As I reflect back we have accomplished so much this year!

Important dates coming up:

• Monday, April 2~ No School 
• Tuesday, April 10th~BEAR Comprehension Assessment. This will take place in class Tuesday morning. Please help your kiddos get a good night sleep the night before and have and protein enriched breakfast.  
• April 11th ~ Furlough Day - No School Wednesday 
• Friday, April 13th ~ Science Day 
• April 23rd~ Early Release 1:00 pm. 
• Friday, April 27th and Monday April 30th ~ FLEX Day testing. Please sign up in the front lobby Sign ups are available on the table. Assessments on those days will take about an hour. A-M on Friday and N-Z on Monday, however, if you are unable to commit to your scheduled day, you may sign up on another day, just know that we do have families with siblings and we want to make sure that we are able to schedule them on like days. Thank you! 

Reading: We continue to work on reading skills/strategies for accuracy, fluency and comprehension. Thinking while reading and connecting to what the author may be trying to make us feel, see and/or believe. We are Predicting, building our background, thinking about what point of view the story is being told. We have taken a look at some tradition fairy tales and some fairy tales that are written from the perspective and influence of a different culture. We have spent a bit of time building our background knowledge on the new culture to help us understand why the characters perhaps made the certain decisions. One example we looked as were the two Fairy Tales…Little Red Riding Hood ~ Traditional Fairy Tale, and Lon Po Po ~ A Red Riding Hood story from China. Additionally, we have been comparing and contrasting of stories as well as some characters within stories. Lastly, we are working on determining the IMPORTANT events and details in the story, the elements of a story (characters/setting, problem, solution), Theme/moral (lesson learned). and the significance of retelling a story in sequence.

Writing: We have sooo much going on in writing we don’t know which way is up! J Anyway we are publishing two writing pieces currently…How-to’s and our Google Docs presentations on Seasons/Weather. We are also beginning to immerse into our next writing piece…which we will create our own fractured fairy tales. We will again use the writing process to take us through our fairy tale writing piece, we will use mentor texts to help develop our craft and we will really focus on sequence of events and we will work on developing our characters in our stories.

Science/Social Studies: We just finished up our unit on Weather/Seasons. Kiddos looked at seasonal patterns and weather, severe weather, tools for collecting weather data, and the effect weather has on organisms and the environments around them.

After Spring Break we will begin our unit on Geography. We will look at where we live and how it influences our lives, components of physical and human features on a map and in our environment. Additionally, we will look at geographical terms and tools used in Geography.

Math: we just finished up with Fractions the kids did amazing with this. We looked at halves, fourths, three-fourths of wholes and sets. This week we jumped back into addition with odd and even numbers. We will be representing numbers using the place-value model (hundreds, tens, and ones). We will be finding solutions to addition and subtractions computation problems within 100 and extend addition strategies for adding and subtracting with quantities up to 1000. Additionally students will able to apply addition and subtraction strategies to find the unknown in addition and subtraction word problems from all types of situations like: adding to, taking from, putting together, taking apart and comparing.

Passion projects: At this time ALL kiddos in the class have an opportunity to learn about something that they are passionate about and/or something they would like to become an expert on. This project encourages and teaches student the love of learning and helps foster life-long learning and promotes independence as they tackle topics at their own pace and learning style. We will be working on passion projects on Friday’s ONLY from 9-10 a.m. In order for the kiddos to be able to work on their projects on Friday’s they will have to be caught up on all core classroom work. All students have decided on a topic. Students may need some additional y help at home for some additional supplies, to help make arrangements for an interview or to visit a particular place to get more information and/or to help access appropriate internet websites to get information, use of technology such as creating video tape. Each project will have two parts: the first part is some sort of Visual component (poster, books, scrapbook, travel brochure, video etc~ ideas are limitless). Along with each visual piece there will also need to be a written piece connected to the project (report, journal, poem etc.).

Please watch for an additional email on how to access Google docs from home (kiddos know how to login and how to use Google docs presentation) so if the kids want to work on it at home and they have chosen to do a Power Point (they will need to use Google docs presentation to do that). I appreciate all of your support and encouragement for your kiddo they are all excited about their topics. Special Thanks to Molly Iskalis, Sheila Haggard and Penny Venn for your support and willingness to volunteer and help the kiddos with their projects.!!!

Have a super duper safe and happy spring break!



Ms. Bemis