Mrs. LaForge has planned a fun filled field day for students this year. Field Day is scheduled for Friday June 11th. We will spend all day doing various activities around the school. Our class is wearing GREEN for this day. Also, remember to put sunscreen on your child before school and send in a water bottle (there will be water available on site as well) Remember to send in permission for your child to have a popsicle. This day should be a lot of fun and I can’t wait to share pictures!

Hello all! May has come to a close and these next 2 weeks bring a lot of fun and sadness as your children prepare to move on to 3rd grade. May has been an exciting and busy month and I hope I can remember all the things we have been working on to give you a little update

Reading: We have been doing a lot of work with non-fiction reading comprehension this month. Now that we have mastered our reading strategies for fiction, we have been working on reading a non-fiction text and answering and responding to  comprehension questions. We are still perfecting our fluency skills as it will help us to become better readers. We have been reading a lot of fiction and non-fiction butterfly texts and responding in various ways.

Writing/Word Study: Our phonics lessons have slowly come to a close. We worked on the following phonics principles in May; ending blends, silent letters, prefixes, suffixes and other various ideas that we are reviewing from earlier in the year. I am continuing to stress the various parts of speech that we have learned about all year (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs & pronouns)

We have been very busy writers as this year comes to a close. Recently we have been writing some great personal narratives that show all the hard work we have been doing this whole year in writing. We have also been writing some non-fiction texts on the life cycle of a butterfly, this is a culmination of our expository writing we have done this year. Each of these pieces will be sent home by the end of the week with a graded rubric to show parents the progress we have made this trimester and will hopefully outline your child’s strengths and weaknesses as a writer. Be sure to check out some of our class books that will be showcased at the Celebration of Learning.

Math- We are finishing up our last unit entitled ” How Many Pockets, How Many Teeth.” This unit tied together all we have learned about collection and representing data. We have been creating many line plots in class and analyzing the data we have represented. We will continue to do a data project in class this week in which students will be choosing a data question, surveying their classmates, and creating and analyzing a representation of this data. The test for this unit will be sometime next week. We have also been reviewing various mathematical topics that have been learned throughout the year.

Science- Our Butterflies have flown away! This month we watched a butterfly go through 4 fascinating stages of life. We first received small Painted Lady caterpillars that were placed in a container on the student’s desks. Then, eventually this caterpillar spun a silk chrysalis around itself and attached to the top of the container. Then, they emerged into beautiful butterflies which we released this past Friday into the courtyard. The kids really loved watching their butterflies change

The next few weeks will include a bit of everything as we wrap up the year. There will be no more homework packets and spelling test these last two weeks. I am planning some fun things for the class to end this fabulous year!

Hello All! I hope everyone had a very restful vacation. I enjoyed hearing about everything that your children did over vacation. It somehow feels like the end of the year is quickly approaching and yesterday was just March it seems! Here are some things that we have been hard at work at in Room 218. We completed our math unit on shapes, halves and symmetry and this test will be coming home before the end of the week. We are now moving on to a unit on fractions which the students seem to be enjoying thus far. We will continue to be working on 2 & 3 digit addition and subtraction with and without regrouping so please continue to practice these facts at home as we will be practicing them in school to prepare for more difficult concepts. In science we are moving on with our soil study. Our worms continue to fertilize the soil and prepare it with nutrients that will ensure for great growing! We are also deep into our study of North America. We are learning about the countries, land, water, culture, people, animals and climate of this diverse continent. Next week we are beginning South America and will be capping off of North America study with a fun Cinco de Mayo day (more on that later.) I have incorporated some great literature that centers around each continent and we will be discussing and responding to these selections. We are working on using our comprehension skills to remember what we read and apply our knowledge. We continue to do exercises during center time to improve our fluency.  For the past few weeks we have been reading and writing Fables. We have learned that fables are entertaining stories involving animals with human-like qualities and that each fables teach us a lesson. We are writing our own fables in class and they are turning out great! We have also been reading and writing poetry as April is national poetry month. We hope to continue this study of poetry this week and next week.  Have a good week!

* Please send in any paper towel or toilet paper rolls you have around the house for a fun craft for next week, Thanks!*

March has finally come to a close and much like they say, it came in like a lion and out like a lamb. We have been enjoying this new spring weather and there are many things we have done in March. In Reading we are working on various comprehension strategies that we use to understand what we read. We are learning about these strategies as a class and then integrating them into our independent reading and small reading groups. These comprehension strategies include, making connections, monitoring comprehension, summarizing, making predictions, and asking questions. We are doing this through the use of fiction and non fiction texts. Our weekly readers have coincidentally been focused on rain forests, frogs and other fun non fiction topics. We often share how interesting the new show  “Life” is that airs on Sunday nights, very fascinating! We have also been participating in various activities that build our fluency, such as shared reading exercises and reader’s theater. Each activity is planned to help students improve their reading fluency. We are starting to begin learning about Fables and what are the elements of a Fable. This unit will culminate with students writing their own fables. In phonics we are learning about homophones, homographs, double consonants at the end of words, and adding plurals to words that end in f, fe, or lf. During writing time we are still doing fun writing prompts that help us to practice crafting paragraphs and stories using the 6 Traits. We are still working on adding interesting words into our writing and are also talking about how to make our sentences sound fluent when we read/write them. We wrote short stories and expository paragraphs about how we stay healthy. We kicked off National Poetry Month with a fun Kite Diamonte Poem. The students wrote poems that were in the shape of a diamond that highlighted two spring words, Lion and Lamb! Then they turned these into kites and they are hanging up on the bulletin board (That means Dinosaur Reports will be coming home soon!) In math we are hard at work in our Putting Together and Taking Apart unit. We have been focusing on addition and subtraction problems and strategies, working with the number 100, and recently have begun the tricky concept of regrouping/trading (Some may know this as borrowing or carrying) This is a hard concept for some students and we will be focusing on this until the test on the 14th, 15th, and 16th of April. Remember that we are learning the traditional algorithm along with another strategy. In science/social studies we are still diving into the world of soil and worms and are also starting to learn about the 7 continents! Keep up the great work and we will begin the countdown to April vacation!

We had a great day all dressed in green, writing Limericks and graphing Lucky Charms. A leprechaun even snuck into our room overnight and left green footprints all over the classroom!!!

Thank you to Mrs. Fairbanks, Mrs.Moore, Mrs.Carlson and Police Chief Mulligan for reading to our classroom this week, we had so much fun listening to you!

I am finally getting a chance to blog about last week, the beautiful weekend inspired me to do some things outside and I hope you did the same! I unfortunately did not get a chance to give out the homework packet on Friday due to report cards so I hope that you have not been thrown off. Here are some of the things that we worked on last week. We have been working on the following skills in reading: main ideas/supporting details, connections, questioning, summarizing and identifying the story elements. Now that we are skilled at accurately reading words we encounter at our reading levels we are trying to focus on fluency when we read. This helps us to better understand what the author means. We have been doing this through various literature connections. We have also been working on identifying the beginning, middle, and end of a story and applying that to our writer’s workshop where we have been writing short stories. I am looking for the students to organize their ideas effectively and make sure that their story follows a logical progression with characters and setting. I encourage them to use as many interesting words as they see fit for their story. This is a creative writing activity but I am alternating between creative writing and prompted writing so that children can see the difference. Writing in our green folders is always creative and is a chance for students to fall in love with writing from their own ideas. As always we continue to respond to poetry and journal prompts. In math we are focusing on using strategies to solve addition and subtraction problems. Please review the study “bookmark” I sent home today with your students, these are the strategies we will be focusing on this week. We have learned the traditional “algorithm” for solving 2& 3 digit addition and subtraction problems without regrouping or trading/borrowing. At the end of this week and next week we will learn all about regrouping. As always, keep practicing those facts at home, automatic retrieval makes the more complex concepts easier for your child to grasp. In science we are continuing our study on soil, this week we will be investigating it’s properties, dry and wet! Thursday the students got to watch me and other fellow teachers play in a floor hockey tournament, it was a fun activity for the half day, they loved it! Keep watching for updated photos from St.Patrick’s Day and Mystery Readers! Have a great week

Started this Monday

Monday~ Library

Tuesday~ Gym

Wednesday~ Art

Thursday~ Music

Friday~ Guidance

Here are some pictures of the class making the homes for the worms and putting them inside their new homes! Ask your child what we put in the soil to make a good home for the worms. Also, how will the worms help the soil and what will they be doing? We can already see the worms making small tunnels in the soil!

Here are some pictures from our most recent mystery readers. Nolan’s dad came to visit on Friday and read a funny book entitled “Click Clack Moo, Cows That Type.” Also, on Monday Dillon’s mom came in and read a great non-fiction text entitled “Moon Shot: The Flight of Apollo 11.” Thank you also to Mr. Messina who read on Monday while I was at a conference. I can’t wait to see who will come to our door next!