Weekly update 3/28

 Important upcoming dates:

4/5: Fine Arts Festival at Archway Lincoln with PaperPie Booksale

4/18-4/21: No School

4/25: Birthday Book Club, Spirit Day, Treat Friday

5/9: Kindergarten Field Trip - more information soon

5/21: Kindergarten promotion 

**Doors open @ 10:30, ceremony starts @11:00 am, all classes together**

Save the Date - Fine Arts Festival

On Saturday, April 5, from 9am-1pm, we will hold a Fine Arts Festival. Bring the family and enjoy a walking tour of artwork, recorded Music performances, PaperPie Book Fair (one day only!) Food trucks, face painting, picture props, and more family fun!

Spalding:

Continue to review all the phonograms. Try to take time to determine which phonograms your child doesn't know and do extra practice with them. We have noticed that they might know them when they see the cards, but do they know them when you say the sounds and they need to write them. This is a more difficult skill, which is especially important for sounding out words and writing sentences. 

Literature:

Continuing our unit on Children's Literature, we enjoyed reading The Velveteen Rabbit together this week. We talked about our toys and stuffed animals that mean so much to us and all the ways we play with them and love them. We recognized the feelings the Velveteen Rabbit had throughout the story. We loved the surprise ending and were happy for the Velveteen Rabbit. For Poetry, we reminisced about one of our past poems Winter Wind. We had fun reciting it again and went deeper, counting the lines and discovering the rhyming words. We also talked about what the weather was doing in each of the stanzas. Finally, Grammar taught us about exclamatory sentences and when to use an exclamation point. We enjoyed hearing how someone's voice changes when reading these expressive sentences. The scholars agreed these sentences show strong emotions such as excitement, frustration, or anger.

Math:

Scholars practiced several ways to solve subtraction sentences this week. We will start to hone in on which method they prefer the most and ask them to continue to use that preferred method to build accuracy. In many ways it is helpful for it to be the same method they chose for solving addition equations, but it can vary. The goal is to consistently obtain the correct answer while understanding the process. Eventually, we will move to rote memorization, but it is still important now that we focus on the process and how we solve the subtraction problems.

History:

We learned about countries Peru and Ecuador located in the continent South America this week. We looked at Machu Picchu and discovered that it is on an old mountain with 140 buildings within the city and 100 flights of stone steps. We also learned that the Inca Empire used llamas to help move materials up the mountain.