December 2, 2013

We hope you all had a wonderful holiday weekend with your family and friends.  We truly enjoyed our time with our loved ones and came back rested and ready to start off the month of December right.   

Bar Model Mania

We just finished our unit on Bar Modeling and were so impressed with the children's skills.  They really got the "hang" of it. Although the bars can be challenging to draw, visually, they helped the children to decipher the correct operation to use when solving a word problem.  They also aid the students when solving a two-step word problem. We are extremely proud of our mathematicians in Room 13!

Poetry

We are currently deep into the revision phase of the writing process.  The children generated SOOOO many amazing poems using a variety of poetic elements during the collection process. They were then asked to select three poems that they would like to work on for the rest of the unit.  As part of the revision process, they will be using a checklist to enhance their writing pieces. The checklist contains many elements of poetry and will help the children to produce interesting and creative poems.  We can't wait for you to see our finished final published pieces because we know they will be awesome!    

Reading

Connecting, Visualizing, now Inferencing- OH MY!

Our Reading Workshop skill this month will be inferencing.  Our students have already had an ample amount of exposure to this important skill due to our Shared Reading experience each morning.  We know inferencing is an important skill that develops strong readers who draw conclusions and come to ideas that are not stated explicitly in the text.  Ask your child about the formula we use to make inferences in our classroom!

Communities

Our class has spent a lot time learning about the three different kinds of communities.  We used this knowledge to generate two kinds of writing; informational and persuasive.  We truly feel they have a strong understanding of the importance of the different kinds of communitites and the need for all three.  We also had an impromptu speaker from a rural community (thanks to Mr. Sinanis' friend on Twitter).  He told us what life was like in a farm community and answered all of our amazing questions.  He even told us that in 12th grade, the seniors get to drive their tractors to school one day of the year.  How cool is that? We wonder what community each child will choose to live in when they grow up!

Our trip to the Queens County Farm was a huge success! We learned the importance of the sheep's covering. A bumpy hayride around the farm was the highlight of the trip! Thank you Mrs. Hazen and Mr. Danzig for joining us and helping keep the kids in a straight line for Mr. Marty (our farm guide)! LOL

Scientist of the Week

We had some fantastic experiments this month! Thank you to Jessica, Kamil, and Alex Na. for some awesome experiments! We really appreciate all their efforts in expanding everyone's knowledge on a variety of science topics.  

Mind-Up

Once again, Mrs. Colucci reminds us how important it is to be a "mindful" person. Every Monday for 40 minutes, Mrs. Colucci comes to our classroom and discusses important strategies on how to pay attention, look at the speaker, reduce stress by breathing deeply, keeping calm, exercising, and staying positive. We listed many important jobs that students felt being "mindful" is important. Look at the picture below to see what your child came up with in class. We can't wait for next Monday to see what Mrs. Colucci has planned for students in Room 13!

Holidays! Celebrations! Family! Gifts! Yummy Food!


Jared's family wanted to "kick-off" the holiday season with jelly donuts and potato latkes to help celebrate Hanukkah. Some students were introduced to these traditional Jewish foods. Everyone who tried it....loved it! Thank you Goldberg Family for thinking of us during this special time in your lives. If anyone else would like to share your holiday traditions with us, please feel free to email us to set up a time to celebrate. We are all special and unique and enjoy learning about all customs and traditions. Room 13 is always up for partying!