100th Day of School

We celebrated our 100th day of school on Tuesday, March 5th (where has this year gone??). We incorporated 100 jumps, then 100 knee bends at Morning Meeting; we built structures using 100 blocks, attempted to make a paper chain using 100 paper links, and students suggested other ideas like letting Taffy out of her tank for 100 seconds, or having Snap Pea and Magic Mike fly around for a 100 minutes!

Literacy

We have had three consecutive book clubs running at the moment. One group is using our language program called Ally, one group read Amanda Pig, and a third has been reading Frog and Toad are Friends. Similar to the project that culminated in reading Daniel’s Duck, students who read Amanda Pig made a plane out of cardboard to fly their pigs around. This led to the construction of a zip line that tested out the flights of the planes and discussions about how much weight is needed to make sure the plane can make it down the zip line. It turns out that pigs really do fly!! The group that read Frog and Toad are Friends, are stitching bean bag frogs and will then stuff them with beans or rice. Project-based learning is a wonderful way for students to develop and build on meaningful collaboration, communication, language, and vocabulary development, foster creativity, encourage perseverance, and to have fun!

Math Groups

Students have been learning the basics of money and incorporating the skills they learned from the fraction lessons as well as number placement. Last week, they did an exercise where they needed to earn money that they could use at the class “shop” and when they had saved enough, to be able to purchase items of their choice. To do this, students rolled a dice and added pennies that were the value of the number they had rolled. When they got to ten pennies, they traded at the “bank” for a dime. When they had ten dimes, they traded for a dollar, and so on. There was definitely some slippery finance going on but a lot of fun was had and an appreciation for how much money it takes to be able to buy the items you really want!! We will be revisiting some of the basic computation skills such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division for the next couple of weeks and then we will be moving onto our unit of measurement.

Field Trip

We are looking forward to our field trip to the International Paper Museum on Friday, March 22nd. Thanks to our Room Parents for organizing all the logistics. Have a wonderful rest of the weekend.

Jen and Lisa