Weekly Update 4/4

 Important upcoming dates:

4/25: Spirit Wear, Birthday Book club & Treat Friday

4/18-4/21: No School

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, Book Fair (one day only!) Food trucks, face painting, picture props, and more family fun!

Spalding:

We have continued to focus on reviewing all our phonograms and have focused on the ones we are noticing the students still seem to struggle with. Please also do this at home, noting which phonograms your child needs the most practice with. We have also been working hard to sound out words and create sentences with our phonograms by doing squiggle weekly writings. The students have a random design on their paper that they can turn into anything they want and then write a sentence or more telling the reader about it. Another great thing to do is to challenge your student by having them write some sight words they know to build their word knowledge for writing. 

Literature:

We began reading our student reader books together this week by reading Little Bear as a class. The students loved having their books to follow along and read together as a class. We saw Little Bear decide what to wear for winter weather, make his birthday soup, pretend to fly to the moon, and make many wishes at bedtime until his mom told him a story. In Poetry, we continued reading poems about weather by learning the poem Rain, Rain, Go Away. The students had fun reciting this one and even said they would use it next time it was raining. In Grammar, we reviewed the different types of sentences and their punctuation. We read stories and tried to identify which punctuation it needed by listening to the reader's voices. We had fun making a game out of it.

Math:

We continued our subtraction practice this week. The students used number lines, counting back, pictures, finger counting, and the concept of "part-part-whole" to subtract. They remembered that we've used these same strategies to solve addition problems but now we are using them in a different way. We've reviewed how we know what we should do when we see the (-) minus sign and how it differs from the (+) plus sign. 

History:

This week, the kids had an exciting learning experience as they explored the cultures and geography of Brazil and Argentina. They discovered the vibrant history of Brazil's Carnival, its famous Amazon Rainforest, and the passionate sport of football that unites the country. In Argentina, they learned about tango music and dance, as well as the beautiful landscapes of Patagonia and the Andes mountains. The students also compared the two countries, highlighting the differences in language, food, and traditions. It was a fun and engaging week of learning about these diverse South American nations!

Science:

This week, we focused our weather unit on sunlight. We investigated Earth's surface materials (sand, soil, and water) to discover how sunlight and shade affect them. We made predictions with our prior knowledge and used thermometers to compare the temperatures of these three Earth materials in both the sunlight and the shade. The students understand that sunlight comes from the sun in the sky and it causes Earth's surface to warm. Students also understood that shade slows down heating.