Notes from Mrs. Barnard
These weeks are flying by! I can’t believe Fall is officially upon us and summer is fading into a memory.
We have worked on so many things this week, where do we begin?
Reading- Very shortly we will be in full swing of reading and discussion groups. Our week has been spent preparing for that time. We have been reading, thinking about our reading, writing our thoughts on thought cards, learning the correct way to “Buzz” with our group members and how to go about Reading Workshop so that all can read, learn and think about their books. We have also finished our unit on main ideas and supporting details. The main idea tells what the passage/text is mainly about and the details support that idea.
Math-This was our first full week of switching for Math class. Students that stay or come to me also get to see Mrs. Rowles, the Title 1 Math teacher, every day. This week we started a new chapter on Addition. We have worked with properties (Commutative (order), Associative (grouping), Identity (zero), learned what about sums, addends and differences and made fact family houses.
Language-Our inventor research writing project is in the rough draft stage now! Each child was given some information on important inventors of commonly known or used items. We have walked step by step through the gathering information into a questionnaire, prewriting/organizer stage using a hamburger model and are now beginning our rough draft. This will be a big writing project with each paragraph having a topic sentence, at least three details and a concluding sentence. They are doing a wonderful job!
Science-If you walked in to our classroom you would think we were crazy! We have little yellow cups sitting all over the room with dirt, worms, plants, colored water, soda bottles, salt, celery and a FEW plants. Students have been learning about the needs of plants and also the jobs of each plant part. They got to conduct an experiment using Wisconsin Fast Plant seeds. We talked about how when you change the materials needed for plants, the plant will behave differently. They wrote a hypothesis about what they predicted their plant would do. I have the “normal” plant so we could compare mine to their “changed” experiment. Let me just say, these poor plants have not done well. We worked on drawing conclusions about why the experiment worked, or didn’t work. Our other experiment was using celery and colored water. We wrote another hypothesis on if you put celery in colored water. They predicted that the celery stem and leaves would turn the color of the water. (They’re so smart!) There are little tubes in celery stems that suck up the water and carry it to the plant. This is a vital role of the stem! We have had fun conducting and observing these experiments this week! Make sure you check out the pictures on our blog!
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| In the beginning... |
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| My little sprout |
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| By the end of the week! |
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| ONE GROUP HAS A LEAF! |
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| Ewww... |
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| See the red on the leaves? |
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| In the beginning... |
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| Blue and yellow/green make darker green! |
I mailed the thank-you letters and pictures to the grandparents that got to attend our Grandparent’s Day celebration. Hopefully they will enjoy reliving that day when they see the pictures! (You may also see these pictures on our blog!)
Please remember to send signed midterms and music program permission slip and money back to school as soon as possible.
Remember that Homecoming is this next week! Students will be bringing a note home today about spirit dress up days for next week.
Remember that we get out EARLY on FRIDAY at 1:00! The Homecoming parade starts at 2:00. Hope to see you there!
Enjoy this beautiful Fall weekend!
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