Highlights of the Week 3.27.15

Dear Families,

This week we "made" a sound wave by scattering around the room and raising hands when we heard a ball bounce on the floor in the middle of the room. Students noticed how the people nearest the ball heard the sound first and then it traveled to the outskirts of the room with a wave of hands going up. It was very cool to see. We also did a daylight study for the beginning of spring. We looked at how the location of the sun in the sky has seemed to change through the seasons. We also read Sky Tree: Seeing Science Through Art by Thomas Locker to notice more differences in the sky throughout the seasons.

We also read more books about the Earth, the moon, and the solar system. We listened to a song about the planets and tried to think of a mnemonic to help us remember the names of the planets. Here are a few we came up with:
1) My very eager mother just served us noodles.
2) My very excellent mother just served us nachos.
3) My very energetic mother just served us nuts.
We read one more funny but informative book that gave us more information about why Pluto is now considered a dwarf planet--the book was Pluto Visits Earth!  by Steve Metzger.

Students made a ton of progress in researching their PLP topics. If you haven't done any online or book research at home yet, please make some time to finish this over the weekend. Next week we'll be beginning to organize our facts into topics to create a rough draft of our report.

Many students finished the second lowercase letters handwriting packet this week. We've been tackling the "dive down" letters: p, r, n, m, h, and b.

Second grade mathematicians began a new unit on geometry and fractions with Mr. Hedler and are practicing their addition and subtraction skills with travel story problems. First grade mathematicians are working on fluency for addition/subtraction fact families for combinations of 5 or 10, working on the concept of subtraction with larger two digit numbers, and learning about measurement.

Don't forget next Thursday and Friday are half-days for students. School lets out at 12:30 those days. Parent-Teacher conferences are Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday after school. I'll post the schedule outside our door. Please be on time because most conferences are booked back-to-back.

One more note: On Thursday April 16th our class and Ben's class will be performing a song we learned in Primary Sing at the All School Meeting, 2:30-3:15. If you'd like to hear our song, please join us at the meeting!