I hope you all had a wonderful vacation! I loved hearing all the stories that your children came back with! They were all excited to share what special times you had last week.
We have had a busy week in Room 115! We have started learning all about seeds, trees, and plants. We will start learning about insects next week. The students made trees and labeled each of the parts at the art table. They wrote in their journals about their vacations, what trees give us, and about seeds. Their writing is coming along nicely. We have been practicing putting spaces between our words, periods at the end of the sentences, and uppercase letters at the beginning of sentences. They will continue writing narrative stories during the next couple of weeks and will be writing stories about themselves and some things they have done!
In math, we finished our unit on the position and location of objects. The concepts have been more of a review for the students so we have been trying to come up with some fun and creative ways to practice them. We started our final unit on Analyzing, Comparing, and Composing Shapes. We will be doing some First Grade Step Up Lessons soon! I will be getting ready to assess the students’ addition and subtraction fluency facts in a couple of weeks as well as their sight words. I would encourage you to continue working on these daily. I sent an updated sight word list home today. The words your child already knows are highlighted.
We planted tomato seeds this week. We will watch them grow and then send home the plants after they have grown a little so you can plant them somewhere at your home. Our district is having a tomato growing contest. I’ll send information home about the contest when we send the plants home in a few more weeks.
We took more pictures of different plants/trees around our school today. We have been discussing the changes in nature we have been observing. I would encourage you to do something similar at home if you are able to. I would love for students to bring in their pictures or drawings in a few weeks to show us the changes in nature they observed at their homes! We also went behind the fields near our school to check out the school garden. The peas we planted before vacation have sprouted! The students were excited to see them and are anxious to keep an eye on them over the next couple of weeks!
Lulu and Myrtle (Eastern Box Turtles) are our new class pets for the next few weeks. They are visiting us from the Burlington Science Center. We also received some frog eggs and are excited to watch the tadpoles grow into frogs! We also received a Luna Moth cocoon and will be watching every day for it to hatch! Life cycles make so much more sense when we can see it in our very own classroom! We are very thankful for the resources and shows the Burlington Science Center provide for us. Mr. Musselman presented a Magnet Show earlier this week. The students enjoyed learning about magnets, their poles, and the push and pull forces.
It certainly was a busy week! We have more exciting happenings coming up during the month of May!
Enjoy your weekend!
Melanie Duncan
PS… The Kindergarten typically goes to the Middlesex Fells for a nature hike field trip near the end of May. Due to an already busy end of the year, we will be unable to go on that field trip. We are hoping to use some of the resources closer to our school to help extend our learning of nature this month. I just wanted to let you know in case you were wondering why we hadn’t sent any information home about that trip.
Also, all Box Tops are due on Monday, May 2nd for the school competition. Thanks for sending in a bunch already!
