January 30, 2016

Important Dates and Reminders:
Tuesday: Library
February 6: Penguin Plunge
February 17 - Delayed start
February 18 - Coffee with Sara Rabbe in the library
Ongoing until February 19 - Big Change Round Up

Big Change Round Up
A baggie with information about the Big Change Round Up went home last week. We are collecting change for the University of Vermont Children's Hospital. Kids can bring in change and put it in one of the containers in the office. There is a container for 10 different staff members. The staff member that gets the most money will have to dye their hair a crazy color. And yes, I'm one of those staff members. I dropped to 6th place this week! Check out the containers in the main office.

Literacy:

We continued our study of people who changed the world. This week, we read biographies about Ruby Bridges and Rosa Parks. Our writers are not working on writing their own books about the important people we have been studying.

We also are continuing to learn about nonfiction and ways to organize the information in nonfiction texts. Students are reading books at their independent level and finding their own ways to share the information they are learning.

Math:
We finished up our study of geometry and the mathematicians did great! Sarah Forbes (our ELL teacher who co-teaches math in our room) and I were so impressed with how they handled the complex vocabulary and connected the geometry concepts to our earlier work with number sense. It was so helpful to have Tul Niroula, our Nepali liaison, in our classroom. He has taught geometry at the high school level and was able to answer some tricky questions that the class had about some different shapes. Thanks Tul!

Science: Have I mentioned how much fun we are having during science? Each day we have different force and motion question to explore. He is a slow motion video of one partnership working on using what they know about force and motion to have a ball hit a target.

 I love seeing the perseverance and the flexibility in thinking the the students are using to investigate the questions. At the end of the week, we started working on giving and receiving feedback. This will prepare the class for the work they will be doing in our PBL (Project Based Learning) investigation which starts this coming week.






Classroom Fun:
Two cool things happened this week in class. First, Gabo brought in a 2 dollar bill. The students were fascinated with the picture on the back, so we did some research and we found about the painting on the back of the two dollar bill. It turns out that it is a painting by John Trumball which shows the committee showing the draft of the Declaration of Independence, not the signing of it.


The second fun event was when Abdikarim's mom came in and demonstrated on me how she does henna drawings. Other students shared what they knew about similar art forms in their cultures.