9/29/17

Dear Families,

With most of the community building and team building wrapped up, we are diving deeper into our traditional academics.  Many of the students in class were eager to begin reading, math, and academics with a growth mindset to boot!  Below I will outline a few things that we’ve been up to the last couple weeks, and any important events coming up.

Reading

In reading we are coming to the end of setting up reader's workshop.  Students have been working on strategies to sustain independent reading, how to avoid reading distractions, how to make sure you understand the author’s message, and how to solve unknown words in their books.  Check out your child’s Seesaw account to see a few examples of the work they have been doing in reading lately!

Students will be coming home tonight with their first reading homework of the year--wooohoo!!  This year students will be handing in reading logs every-other Friday.  Students are expected to read 30 minutes each night, five nights per week.  They are always welcome to read more, but this is the requirement.  Please help your child remember to record their reading, but at the end of the day, it is their  responsibility to record and turn in reading logs.  The first reading log will be due October 13th.  

Science

Student have been busy working through a unit on potential and kinetic energy.  They have been exploring many different ways to understand and apply their knowledge of these two types of energy.  If you haven’t done so with your child already, check out the website linerider.com.  Ask them to create a track and demonstrate their knowledge of potential and kinetic energy.  We have also built a few different models using the VEX robotics kits to include pendulums and vehicles.  

Math

This week we learned about collecting, representing, and analyzing data. As a class we collected data on the number of raisins in a box of raisins. Students learned how to organize data in a data table, create line plot graphs, and develop questions that could be answered using the data they collected. Next week students will come up with their own testable questions. They will collect their own data, represent their data as a table and graph. Then they will create questions for the class to answer about their data.

Flynn

On Monday, October 2nd Grades K-4 at TBPS are headed to the Flynn Theater in Burlington for a performance of My Father’s Dragon. With talking animals, a daring rescue, a flying dragon, buried treasure, and lots of humor throughout, this fabulous adventure is brought to the stage using puppets, masks, inventive scenic effects and original music. Enchantment Theatre Company presents the story of a compassionate and courageous young boy and his unlikely friendship with a splendid yellow and blue striped dragon.

We are leaving school at 10:45 and will be returning by 2:00. All students & staff will ride the bus to the Flynn Theater in Burlington for this performance. We will be eating lunch on the bus (thanks to permission from the bus company) therefore:

1. No peanuts or tree nuts!  Please read the labels.
2. No glass or plastic containers.
3. No lunch boxes or water bottles.  Please place your child’s lunch in a paper or plastic bag.

All classes with allergies will ride on the same buses.

The PowerSchool forms that are updated at the beginning of the year have a blanket permission slip for field trips so we are not sending home separate ones for this trip. Consider this notification of our trip on Monday, October 2nd. If you don't want your child to go you will need to make arrangements to pick them up that day before 10:45 (please notify the office if you are going to do that).

Upcoming Dates:

NO SCHOOL- 10/6 & 1/9

9/14/17

Dear Families,

We have been very busy the last few weeks working to build our classroom community.  We have participated in a variety of teambuilding scenarios to work on skills that include:  communication, compromise, helping each other, paying attention to the needs of the group, creative problem solving, and the ability to ask for help when it’s needed.  These activities are fun, but the main goal is for students to internalize the strategies they used working together in games, and apply it in the classroom.  We have also been spending time learning more about our classmates, by sharing the amazing memory boxes that each student brought in to share.  

Students will begin MAP testing next week.  The results of these assessments provide teachers with information on each student in regards to their reading and math development.  This information will allow Ms. Figdor and I to deliver content at a level that aligns with each student’s needs.  Students will be taking the math assessment on Monday with Ms. Figdor, and the reading section with me on Wednesday.  If you have any questions about this new tool please let me know.  

We have had an amazing first learning experience in science this week.  Each student was asked to make a prediction about what they think would happen to a gummy bear when left in cold water overnight.  Every single student predicted that their gummy bear would dissolve in water, based on a similar experiment we did last year with Gobstoppers.  What we found is that they actually absorbed water, and some even tripled in size!!  We took the experiment even further by changing the liquid, or the gummy animal used.  Choices included corn syrup, milk, water, gummy worms, and sour gummy worms.  After a process of elimination we decided that it was the water being absorbed, regardless of the object placed in it.  

Students will be coming home each week with Friday Letters.  These letters will help you know what your child has been up to at school during the week.  The will come home on Fridays (naturally) so be on the lookout for them!  

Upcoming Dates:

¾ Open House 9/26 from  5:30-6:30

Picture Day- 9/22

¾ Team Building Day at Dac Rowe- 10/2

Have a great week,

Mr. G