Hello Families!
First of all, thank you for attending Back to School Night! We had a great turn out in our classroom. I hope that you were able to get a little glimpse into your child's world at school. I know your children were excited that you got to use the responders! :-)
This week, we took a reading assessment, which came home on Friday. The students had to read the questions carefully as the questions were very specific about the sequence of events. We went over the test in small groups so that students understood why they received the grade they did. We began a new week with the essential question "How do people from different cultures contribute to a community?" We have read two stories, one about Faith Ringgold and her famous quilt paintings and another about a girl whose Japanese family helps to plant a garden in a small space. Again, we are working on the comprehension strategy of sequencing!
In math, we have moved on to addition properties and adding 2 or 3 digit numbers. We have math in the afternoon, which is a struggle for everyone. The students and I have been working on trying our best to pay attention!
Our most exciting activity this week has probably been our correspondence with our favorite brain break group, Koo Koo Kanga Roo! I discovered a great website GoNoodle, that offers free brain break videos. I noticed that the students LOVED the Koo Koo Kanga Roo ones and I usually had all 17 students participating. I emailed their group to let them know just how much we enjoyed their videos and the students wrote them friendly letters. And wouldn't you know it...but they wrote back to my email! The friendly letters are on their way to them right now! Another exciting part of the GoNoodle website is watching our brain break minutes go up. We had an avatar, Flo Yo, who would "grow up" as we increased our brain break minutes. On Friday, we maxed out Flo Yo, which the students were ecstatic about! This lead to a writing activity about Flo Yo's adventures. These brain breaks will continue as long as I have hard working students who deserve it! :-)
