Highlights of the Week: April 17, 2015

Hello families,

We've had a busy, exciting week. Students worked hard to organize their notefacts into topic sections. Sounds simple, but it's a lot of steps. After we sorted our color coded facts students organized one color at a time. Reading the facts and then deciding what order to put them in to sound good. Sometimes students needed to add a transition sentence or change some words to make it sound smooth. 

We read Your Fantastic Elastic Brain: Stretch it, Shape it and learned about all the parts of a brain, what they do, and how they work together. We learned about how the first 10 years of life are the most powerful for a brain to stretch and grow--the more you work hard to learn and make new connections in your brain, the more powerful your brain can be and the more you can learn throughout your life. We talked about how making mistakes is part of learning and how important they are. Making mistakes actually makes your brain stronger because it creates more connections between ideas and experiences. We also shared examples from our own lives about how we've made mistakes and persevered to learn new things. We talk a lot in our room about accepting how every person learns and how it's okay to make mistakes. This week we added to that idea by talking about perseverance. Talk at home about this--give your child an example from your life.

We continued working on map skills this week, especially about using map symbols and map keys to locate things on a map and how to interpret map symbols. We used the terms near and far to show the relationships between things on maps and also ourselves and things in our room.

Second grade mathematicians continued working on two and three digit subtraction. They also began using their geometry knowledge to learn about fractions. First grade mathematicians are working on the number+9 strategy with all numbers, using the doubles two apart addition strategy, and looking at number patterns.

We had many special events this week: storytellers, special music classes, All School Meeting, and Four Winds. All the 1st and 2nd graders did an amazing & courageous job singing "Old Texas" for the whole school at the ASM.

On Friday lots of gear went home with students as we did our big before vacation clean-out. We're very hopeful that the snow will melt over vacation. However, if there is still snow on the ground we will wear snowpants. Boots we need until the ground is dry, so this may take a bit longer. Please continue sending in indoor shoes as well as the necessary outdoor gear. 

With the warmer weather this week we also talked about spring footwear. It is Rumney policy that students have sneakers or sandals that stay on their feet for P.E. and recess (i.e. not flip flops). Mr. Rosen says flip flops are okay for indoor shoes as long as they have secure footwear for recess and P.E. Thanks for your help in making sure your child is ready for each day's activities!

I hope you all have a wonderful vacation week and enjoy the holidays--Earth Day and Arbor Day-- that occur over this break.