Good afternoon everyone and Happy Friday!
Another great week of learning in Room 15! I attended the NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) Conference on Thursday and Friday but was proud to hear the students worked hard in my absence. I can't wait to use some of the ideas learned during my two days of professional development! During the week, and while I was out students continued their work investigating the States of Matter and the difference between a physical and chemical change. They created FLIPGRID videos explaining some of their learnings and I will be sharing individual links with you later this weekend! It was great to see them making predictions about whether matter would be conserved or not! Ask them what happened when we had a balloon filled with baking soda and put it on top of a water bottle with vinegar in it. Did it weight the same after the gases were released? What about when we just added baking soda to the vinegar without a cap on top? How about physical and chemical changes? Can they give you examples of each? Lots of Scientists in our midst! In writing, we worked hard on our text feature scavenger hunt and then brainstormed a list of ideas we felt confident writing an informative article about. Students brainstormed lists, then chose two they felt they knew the most about and then tried to think of questions their audience might ask them. Next week, using what they have learned about text features and why authors use powerful leads, we will begin our work on our first drafts! In Math, we continue to work hard learning new strategies for multiplying larger numbers. Students show great confidence with the area model and we are working to get them feeling as confident with partial products and the standard algorithm. My goal is to get them feeling great with all three, but to have them at least feel confident enough to use two strategies in order to be able to check their work. One way we can really build our confidence is to practice our math facts at home to build our fluency. We are definitely a little rusty. Students can access IXL from home and focus on the tables giving them the most challenge, or use flash cards, or take home any of the math games they feel help them from school! Let me know if there are specific tables you would like me to help your child work on! Taking our time to set up our work neatly, using graph paper has definitely made a difference! We are also continuing to make connections to the properties of multiplication. In Reading, we have been looking at story elements, this week discussing settings and character traits. We talked about evidence in The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise that would provide Coyote is an adventurous and brave girl. Then students read their own novels and jotted notes about character traits they thought best described the main characters and then discussed with their book partner. I am looking forward to viewing their Flipgrids which they recorded today. We are almost done with our Read Aloud of The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise, I can't wait to see how students react to the next few chapters. Ask them what they think will happen when Coyote gets to the Park. As you can see, we continue to be very busy in Room 15. Thank you for your continued support! Cheers! Maura Important Dates to Remember
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Happy Friday everyone!
Another full week of learning and community building in Room 15! We started the week focused on discussing Cole CARES and designing posters for our room. We discussed what it would look like and sound like if we all followed Cole CARES - Cooperation, Assertion, Responsibility, Empathy and Self-Control. It was great listening to them talk with each other about what is important ! We also learned about the history of the Pineapple as a symbol of hospitality and used this as the springboard for a get-to-know your classmate activity. Students interviewed each other and then designed pineapples to decorate our hallway. We ended our Monday with the outstanding Similarities program from UNH. Students learned about adaptive sports and then spent about 45 minutes playing some games while in wheelchairs. It is one of my favorite programs of the year as their initial excitement, thinking it's so fun to play games in a wheelchair turned to comments like, "Wow, we have only been playing for 15 minutes, I can't imagine not being able to get our this wheelchair". A great discussion was had about having empathy for others and finding ways to include EVERYONE! In Reading this week our focus was on stamina and finding a good spot to read, one free from distractions. Some prefer to sit at their desks, while others like a comfy cushion and noise cancelling headphones. We realized sitting next to our best friend probably isn't the best place to stay focused! We also learned about "Talking Back to Our Books". As we read, we jot things we are thinking about. What surprised me? What am I wondering? What connections can I make? When we ask these questions as we read, we are building a deeper understanding of the characters and themes and building great comprehension skills! We are more than half way through The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise and it is wonderful to have students BEGGING me everyday to read one more chapter.. they are hooked! Ask them what they think is going to happen to Salvador and Esperanza. Today's chapter ended with Coyote saying she was going to have to say goodbye to them tomorrow, but we don't know why! In Writing this week we took a look at Non-Fiction Text features. We are spending time doing a scavenger hunt using Google Slides where we are finding examples of different text features. Next week we will be brainstorming ideas for our first writing project - an informational piece about a topic of their choice. By spending this time learning about the different text features, students should feel more comfortable adding to this first piece of writing. We also are doing a daily language review. Students answer and edit questions based on tenses, parts of speech, sentence structure etc and we go over them together to spiral in many of the grammar rules we should see them following in their writing. For the first few weeks, these are done together, eventually this will be independent work and review will be given to students needing extra help! We also took a look at Jacquelyn Woodson, our poet of the month. We read a few excerpts from her book Brown Girl Dreaming and reminded students that poetry does not have to rhyme. Each week we will look at different poems, discussing their themes and why they have the structures they do. Why do authors choose different structures? Another part of our weekly schedule will be a quote of the week. This week's quote was, " All or dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them" ~ Walt Disney. Students are copying these into their writing journal and writing what they think they mean, and we then discuss as a class. Next week's poem "The quieter YOU become, the more you can hear." ~ Ram Dass. I can't wait for the discussion on this one! We really got our selves into our Scientific Mindsets this week! Our first Unit is all about the Properties of Matter, so this we focused on building models of Solids, Liquids and Gases. We then dug into the difference between a physical and a chemical change in matter with a sorting activity students completed with a partner. Once we had a solid understanding of the difference we needed to do some performance tasks to put our knowledge to work. Today, with the help of our Norwell CARES Juniors, students went through 5 stations/labs. We were looking at whether a physical or chemical reaction occurred when we mixed certain solutions together. We measured the temperature of the substances, watched for any release of gas through bubbles, noted color changes and waited to see if a new precipitate was formed. Students did a nice job! You can check out photos in our gallery! In Math, we worked hard this week while reviewing Base and Exponents and how to write in exponential form as well as expanded form. We then moved into multiplying multi-digit numbers using the Area Model and Partial Products. Students are doing a great job with this! I think they are all realizing that there was a little slippage with math facts over the summer, so we have been spending some time reviewing and they should continue to work on math facts at home! Hope to see you at the Ice Cream Social tonight at 6pm! Please note - My twitter account has been changed to @mreillysclass Have a great weekend! Maura Important Dates to Remember
Good afternoon and Happy Friday!
We made it through our first full week together and are continuing to work on building our classroom community! It was so great to see so many of you at Open House last night and I look forward to working with all of you this year. As I mentioned last night, if we work as a team on your child's progress, the sky is the limit! We started our week with our first Book Tasting! Students were greeted and found their reservation at the Bookworm Bistro where they were sampling from a menu of 5 different genres! Lots of pictures in our gallery for you to look at. One of the biggest take-a-ways for me, the comments by so many that they didn't think they would like some of the books, but once they read a few pages and gave them a chance they are now looking forward to some different genres! In reading we also had Mrs. Fuller, our literacy coordinator come in and work with us on a definition of Non-Fiction. Together we looked through many non-fiction and hybrid titles to note what we saw as characteristics of non-fiction. We then read an article about Vampire Bats and thought about one of our key questions "What Surprised Me?" Students took some time to dig into the article and find facts that surprised them and then thought about what the author was suggesting to us by giving us those facts! Lots of great discussions on this! (Who knew some people thought bats were cute and cuddly? Or.. that they are being used to create medicines that prevent heart attacks!) . We are also really digging into our class read aloud The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise by Dan Gemeinhart. This week Coyote found out a special place in her memory is going to be bulldozed, so she is now trying to trick her father, Rodeo, into heading back to Washington so she can find her special memory box. We are meeting a new cast of characters as the story unfolds, be sure to ask your child what they think will happen? Will Coyote get back to Washington on time? At the end of last year, after reading this book to my class, I search out the author, Dan Gemeinhart on Twitter. I commented on what an impression his novel made on my class, and he offered to do a Skype with my class this year! So, the students don't know the date yet, but on Tuesday, October 15th - we will be skyping with the author. It is truly an amazing experience as the author will answer their questions and also tell about his writing process. Last year my class did this with Dusti Bowling the author of The Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus (our next read aloud) - and it was a highlight of the year! I cannot wait ! In Math, we are working on getting our workshop and menu structure in place. We talked this week about our Math Mindsets. Many students were stating that Math challenges them, and we discussed how we are not going to say "I can't do this" but rather "I can't do this YET!" Working together we will learn strategies to solve problems in many ways. Through the use of our menus, students will receive differentiate support on the topics that challenge them most as we continue to work through the curriculum. As mentioned last night, I will be starting an early morning Extra Math group in October. The first session is October 9th as shown on the schedule given out last night and will be held from 8-8:45am in my room. These weekly sessions are a chance for students to get some extra practice with new strategies and reinforcement on areas of weakness or to get some challenge work if they are ready for more! I will send remind notifications out each week the day before our sessions as we have some sessions on Wednesday and some on Thursday through Christmas. A new schedule will be created for the second half of the year. Any questions, please let me know. Students can come every week or choose to come from time to time - my hope is I will many students at all sessions! In writing, we started to talk about perspective and looked a bit at our Poet of the Month, Jacquelyn Woodson. We talked about Ms. Woodson as an author and a poet and that poetry isn't all about rhyming, that short prose can be very effective in getting our feelings about something out! Students each chose a postcard and wrote about what they saw in the postcard, connections made, or just created stories about something they saw. We then swapped postcards and a second student wrote about the same picture. After we finished our writing we came together and share our stories and poems. It was great to hear the many perspectives and to have students see how we can all see things many different ways! We continue to work on our Class Contract - working together to make posters to show how we will show C.A.R.E.S (Cooperation, Assertion, Responsibility, Empathy and Self Control) in our classroom. We will finish up this important work next week and then all agree to some expectations for our class and will talk about consequences for not following our agreed upon contract. We build this together so that all voices are heard, and we realize what is important to have our classroom community strong! This afternoon Friday folders will be coming home for the first time. Inside there will always be a PINK comment sheet - this should always stay in the folder. I will write a comment every other week and ask that you read and sign on the comment side of the sheet - feel free to comment back with any questions, concerns etc. Everything else comes out of the folder for your review. You will see there is a book order in there - orders are due Friday September 27th. Please make sure folders come back on Monday! Have a wonderful weekend! Thank you for all of your support! Maura Contact Info -
Good afternoon and Happy Friday everyone!
THANK YOU! I just need to say this first as our classroom has loads of tissues, plastic baggies, paper towels, post-its, Solo cups for STEM challenges, Clorox wipes, glue sticks, etc for our year together! I cannot thank you enough for your generosity! Room 15 is off and running! We had two solid days of community building and are learning about daily expectations and things to look forward to this year! We have talked a great deal about leading with kindness! We read Jacqueline Woodson's book Each Kindness, a beautiful story that reminds us to be the good, to find ways to be kind each and every day. If we can remember this as we start our journey together as a class, we will definitely have a great year. We had some fun with a tube of toothpaste and a partner and will try to remember this activity as we promote kind words and deeds this year! We had our first Library session with Mrs. McGarry, our first Music class with Mrs. Gagnon and we were also lucky enough to have Instructional Technology today with Mr. Tinker! Each of these teachers was impressed by the behavior and positive attitudes shown by our class! Woo hoo!! We have been working a great deal already on classroom expectations and will continue this important work over the next few weeks. Together we will come up with a Class Contract, one that we will all sign and agree to abide by this year. I am looking forward to engaging in this important work next week! We have also talked a great deal about what it means to be a good classmate. We had some fun reading We Don't Eat Our Classmates by Ryan T. Higgins and then worked together to brainstorm what we agree a good classmate should look like and sound like! See the photo showing all of our great ideas! We revved our Science minds and worked on our teamwork again on Friday as we completed our first STEM Challenge called Saving Sam! Be sure to ask your child about this great activity which called for students to really listen and work with each other to "save Sam". Check out our photo gallery for some pictures of our hard work! We also started to talk about our thoughts and feelings about Math and began to think about our goals for the year. We took a look at some of the games we will be using this year and saw our Math Menus which we will dig into more next week as we review skills and get ready for new content. Our class read aloud is The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise by Dan Gemeinhart. Please be sure to ask your child to tell you about this book! They have met the main characters: Coyote and her father Rodeo and are waiting to find out what happens when Rodeo wakes up ! This is a wonderful book about friendship and reaching out to others, students are already diving in with great questions and responses! I know Mrs. Burns sent out an email today about our Open House next Thursday. Students are asked to come with you and they will show you our school and classroom. I will give a SHORT overview from 7:05 - 7:15pm before you will head to the Cafeteria for a treat sponsored by the PTO. I am hoping you can all attend and look forward to having the kids show off their classroom community and Cole School! Important Dates to Remember:
Please join our REMIND Class - www.remind.com/join/reilly2019 - this is a messenger service that is free - I don't see your cell number and you don't see mine - but we can basically communicate via text. I can send a link to the weekly newsletter to you this was as well. I use it to remind you of spirit days, field trips, special presentations, project due dates and any other quick news I need to get out during the week instead of via email. Let me know if you have questions about it! Hope you all enjoy a wonderful weekend! We are off to an amazing start! Cheers! Maura |
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March 2020
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