Highlights from Week 15 & 16!

Happy New Year!! We started this new year with a very, VERY full week! We started lots of new units, worked on some assessments (I know!), and started MAP Testing. Because I took a break from blogging over the winter break, I did not put up our December pictures of some of the activities we worked on right before the holidays. At the end of this post, I will show some of those pictures including: gingerbread house making, making Polar Express hot chocolate with our Little Buddies, launching our non-fiction unit, a picture of the snow storm we had, and the holiday gifts students received.

Highlights:
-We chose our Non-Fiction Writing topics this week and will begin our research! In order to do this, students need to find books and articles (at school and/or home) on their topics to help them. This goes along perfectly with our reading unit, which is learning how to read non-fiction text: taking notes, finding main ideas/supporting details, understanding the text and being able to say it in our own words. If you can find articles or get books on the specific topics, please do so and bring it to school.
-In math, we began our new unit on Multiplication or Division with 2-Digit Divisors depending on the math group students are in. This is a short unit, and we will be taking our math tests on Friday of next week: 1/17.
-Rocks and Minerals is our science unit that we also launched. We are learning to talk about the different properties of rocks and carefully observing them. If you have rocks at home that you would like to add to our collection for students to observe, please bring them in!
-In social studies, Ms. Deese's class and our class have started our Medieval Castle unit. Students will be starting to build the structure of the castle on Monday. Each group is assigned a different part of the castle, and this frieze/structure will be right outside our classroom. It will be an ongoing project and next week, students will also create their characters in art and write about them.
-Our Little Buddies came to our class today to present their All About Posters on different animals. It was so nice to see their learning and presentation skills. Room 307 students were the most amazing audience! They sat quietly and gave specfic compliments to the Kindergarten and 1st grade presenters.
-We took our MAP Math test today in the computer lab, and will be taking the Reading portion on Monday. Students are writing down their scores to meet their goal, so please ask students on Monday what their reading/math scores are if you are curious.
-Last but not least: Mrs. Froberg (our student teacher) shared about herself on Thursday. She showed us pictures and shared about her life growing up in Canada and some of her hobbies including cooking! I have linked her cooking blog so that you can check out one of her passions outside of teaching! Along that note, please sign and return the permission slip that went home about the video taping of her lessons. It is very important - thank you!