Missed my Action Takers over the Thanksgiving Break! It's such a great way to start our day:) After our Morning Meeting we looked at a picture shared by Kris Semrad as a culminating activity to our planner to see what they would See, Think, and Wonder after discussing animals, environments and human activities for the past 6 weeks. We had an All School Monday Morning Meeting that also spoke about action the school is taking due to all the trash in our cafeteria. Numbers are posted that the students are asked to write ideas about. Students are collecting items and counting them to see how much trash we are making from breakfast and lunch. One of our students, Michael Arrington, also won a Random Act of Kindness during the meeting. This Monday action inspired more action as the week went on! In Mandarin they have been practicing Jingle Bells for the Winter Concert and learning how to answer questions about the days of the week and the months of the year. Everyday we take a few minutes for some mindfulness activities or a Brain Break activity whenever I can tell they need it. Students also got a little more time this week to work in the Exploration Station with fossils before I take them back to my sister. They have loved observing, exploring and inquiring about all of them throughout this planner. In Math we learned about line plots as we charted their heights in centimeters. Mr. Bearden came in on Friday and made us Smoothies for the Dance-a-Thon prize we won for how much money our class collected. Thank you to all the parents who worked so hard to get all of those donations and to Mr. Kukla for setting this up for them. They said they were really yummy and enjoyed the surprise because they had no clue until we went down to the cooking kitchen. On Friday we finally got to watch a video titled "The Story of Stuff" by Annie Leonard. It was recommended by Divya Sridhar who felt it would be a good video to watch this time of year when students will be getting more "stuff" over the holidays. It was a good video to watch after a planner on how environments change over time because they went into the video with that knowledge. After they watched they shared so many details and then shared ways we could make a difference, which was what Divya was hoping for. They wanted to know if we could bring in toys we no longer play with. She has contacted a company that takes toys and modifies them for students with special needs and will be sending home more information about it this coming week. I knew that this class that shares the actions they are taking all the time would come up with a great plan for us.
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At the K-2 Morning Meeting we celebrated our October Reflective Award Winner and November Birthdays. We also heard about the Pajama Drive from Ms. Dottore and who will be benefitting from our donations. Every class that donates 10 pajamas earns a Pajama Day on our last day before winter break. After our Morning Meeting Peyton shared how a piece of plastic affects environments and the animals in it. She made a connection with our planner and shared her knowledge with the rest of us. Students are learning about fossils in this planner so I called my sister who has a pretty big fossil collection and she let us put them in our exploration station to learn and observe. I heard Demetrius say that he thinks we need to do a S.O.L.E. about fossils so we can learn more. I love when the learning and desire to know more comes from the students. Here's another example of two students working together to help each other read the story of the week. On Tuesday 4th graders came and taught us a lesson on how to be safe while taking the trolley so that we were prepared for our trip to see Wonder. On Thursday we got to do an experiment that showed us the parts of the water cycle. We learned about evaporation, condensation and precipitation. We also learned that it's not easy to squirt shaving cream on our own :) On Friday we had so much fun on our walk, taking the trolley, enjoying our snack packs and watching the book Wonder come to life on the screen. The conversations back in the classroom when we got back were awesome! They described so many parts of the book as the shared what was the same or different between the two. Thank you for allowing them the opportunity to have this experience at school with their classmates and teacher:) We ended our day and week with a play put on by Juliana, Kalilah & Peyton that they put together during Free Choice Friday. On Monday, November 20th we worked on our first RAFT during Writer's Workshop which stands for Role, Audience, Format, and Topic. Today our role was to be an animal, the audience was a farmer, the format was to write a letter from the animal's perspective and the topic was how the animal's environment has been changed. They shared their letters with the group during Sharing Circle. They were able to take on the perspective of the animals really well and explain how their environments had been changed, how this made them feel, and how their families and lives were affected. During the morning and afternoon groups of students also went to different floors with iPads to take pictures of human activities that have changed our school environment. It was easy for them to find negative ways humans have changed the environment but once we discussed that there can be positive and negative changes they were able to name a few positives they noticed. See if they can do this same activity in their neighborhoods and make a list and share with us at school. Mari also took action at home by making her own chart of Natural Events and Human Activities and bringing it in to share with the class. When you notice you child taking action like this please have them bring it in to share or send me a picture to my email. When students see their peers take action it inspires them to take action- thanks Mari for starting my week off with a smile :)
Students enjoyed the maze game that Lin Lou Shi came up with on Monday that reviewed days and months in Mandarin. They always LOVE taking a Go Noodle break before we start our Inquiry into Math. Each week a new student gets to choose our brain breakers for each day. I love seeing their smiles:) It was another FUN Wednesday with the Boys Book Club- New Book choice coming next week! Students were introduced to the "Hamburger" informative writing chapter organizer. They also got to share their Headings and Three Facts with their classmates to make sure they were on topic. Closing Circle is at the end of every day where we get to end our day reflecting on our learning and celebrating each other. This week's Closing Circle Activity was COMPLIMENTS. I had different compliment cards that I read each morning and asked them to think about who deserved the compliment for the day. They needed to give us an example of what that classmate did to deserve it. The smiles on their faces when another classmate complimented them was just precious. Since it was short week we will continue the activity next week as well.
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AuthorMrs. Humphrey
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