What an exciting week!

We were all excited for Tuesday to arrive! The boys were very proud to have their families here to see their performance, look at their owl projects and join them during the reception. Thank you to all of you who came - I hope you feel proud of your son's hard work and efforts! It has been a great experience for our class. It was wonderful to see someone here from every family!

On Wednesday we welcomed a new student to our classroom. The boys have done a great job showing him around our classroom and being good role models. This is a very kind hearted class!

We loved putting our costumes on for our Loon Lake Halloween parade and party! Thank you parents for the wonderful and healthy snacks! They were enjoyed!

On Friday we will start working on our weather unit a little more, and begin to talk about Pilgrims and Native Americans.

Our Field Trip to the Outdoor Center

We had a beautiful day to go to the Outdoor Center! We looked for seeds in the woods on our long hike. We also saw a river and a man who was out in the river fishing. We found three owl pellets in the woods to bring back to our classroom.

Back at the Science building, we learned about bats and owls and compared them to each other. We looked around at nocturnal animals and animal skins. After lunch, we made designs with dye squeezed out of carrots and beets and made leaf rubbings. We were pretty worn out by the time we got back on the bus! We will have more pictures for you to see next week during our performance.

Pumpkin Science

Friday was a wonderful day for the Loon Lake Fun Run. The boys wore their yellow T-shirts, enjoyed running and walking outside, and had a great snack for our PTA.

Monday was "Pumpkin Palooza" in our classroom. We cut one pumpkin up and put it in a big jar, and we cut the tops off of two other pumpkins and filled them with dirt. We made predictions about what we think might happen, and wrote about/drew about our pumpkin experiments in our science journals.It was a lot of fun!  Maybe we will have something exciting to show you when you come to see our play next Tuesday!

We will go on our field trip to the Outdoor Center on Wednesday. Children need to dress warmly because we will spend some of the time outdoors. They need to pack a lunch and drink in a bag. This class loves science, so it should be a wonderful field trip!

A Great Start to our Week!

Monday was very exciting! First, one of our boys was on our school newscast. He earned a PBS slip last week and his name was chosen from the PBS mailbox - this meant he had an opportunity to read  a story about someone he admires in his life and tell why that person is one of the 5 "R's" - ready, reliable, respectful, responsible or resilient. Our classmate did a great job and inspired us all to work hard and earn PBS slips of our own.

Monday was also exciting because we received a box filled with new Center Time activities. We have Zoob, Bristle Blocks and Gears - all are for building with. We also have new Native American figures, canoes and a tepee for another center. Our class loves to build and create and these toys are great for playing with someone!

Our social skills this week were related to building stamina for focusing, and learning how to ask for help when we are stuck or don't know what to do. Sometimes frustration makes us feel like just giving up, so we encourage our students to raise their hands and say, "I need help."
On Friday afternoon our class will go out on the playground for the Loon Lake Fun Run. This is a great, PTA sponsored event for our school, as well as being a fundraiser.
 Next Wednesday is our Field Trip to the WL Outdoor Center - your son needs to dress warmly (we will be outside for many activities) and bring a lunch in a bag ( with his name on it).
We are hard at work on our play for our performance on October 29 at 2:00  - we hope many of you will be able to come see it!

 

We started our owl pellet dissection like this. We made predictions about what was inside our pellets.  Everyone had their own sterilized owl pellet and some tools to use. We each had a bone chart so we could compare the bones and skulls we found with the bones and skulls of different types of animals that an owl might eat.

 

 

We had to work very carefully to find all of the tiny bones in our pellets. It was exciting to see how many bones were inside each pellet - we could tell that different owls had eaten different animals. One pellet even had a little seed inside of it - we decided that the owl ate a mouse and the mouse had eaten a seed! When we were all done, we carefully mounted our bones on paper and glued them down. You will be able to see the bones and our owl work on the day of our play, Tuesday, October 29 at 2:00. You will be able to take the bones home with you!

 

 

Our first Parent Support Group Meeting will be this Wednesday, from 6:30-7:30.  We would love to have you join us!

 

Our Field Trip to the Outdoor Center is on October 23. 

 

 



 



 



Owl Week

This week we had a new classmate join our group! We're excited to have a new friend, and to help show him all about our classroom. Now we have 8 boys in room 113!

In our social skills lessons we are working on how to tune out distractions. There are distractions all around us at school, so we are learning about which things to focus on and which things to ignore. The coping skill, "self talk" is a good one for this - we can tell ourselves that we need to focus on the teacher or our work and we need to ignore the other sounds. The boys are working hard at building their stamina for focusing on the right things. They understand that they need to get their bodies calm in order to focus.

Have you heard about our brag tags? We each have a necklace and we work to earn special tags and beads to put on our necklaces. We've earned tags for looking and listening, for assembly behavior, for being reading wizards and for our hallway behavior. We even earned a bead on school picture day! We are pretty proud of our tags!

This week is all about owls! We are reading both fiction and non-fiction owl books, recording our new learning in special owl books, and creating owls for our classroom. On Thursday we will each dissect an owl pellet - we will show you what we find at our Halloween Play on October 29th at 2:00.  Some science words we've used this week include: nocturnal, oviparous talons, habitat, predator and pellet.

Our first Parent Support Group Meeting will be next Wednesday, October 9 from 6:30-7:30 in Room 114 (Mrs. Cohen's room, right next door to ours) I hope that many of you will be able to join us. We plan to discuss how we can work together to help change behaviors that may be problematic for your children. Our meetings are open to all parents, grandparents and caregivers. We talk openly with one another, and without judgement - just support!

Listening and focusing!

This year our classroom has five Chrome Books to learn about and use. We are able to access some great learning games to help us develop our reading and math skills, as well as our keypad skills. We also go into the computer lab on Monday mornings and work with Mr. Stearns - we need to listen and watch when he gives directions so that we can learn these new skills.

Mrs. Schnieders works with us on learning new coping skills, solving problems and developing good ways to express our feelings. She often calls over small groups to the social work table.

This week we continued to talk about how important listening is at school. We practiced ways we can focus our attention and really listen to directions, a story or even another person who is speaking to us. We also learned that we can repeat directions to help remember them - this will help us complete work easily and to know what to do in class.

Next week we will be learning about owls! We will do many science activities, including dissecting owl pellets. We will have our owl projects and our pellet dissection on display after our play on Tuesday, October 29 at 2:00. We hope many of you will be able to join us in our classroom that afternoon.

The permission slips for our field trip to the Outdoor Center on October 23 are coming home. Please fill out the permission slip and send it back. The cost is $5 - our mini-grant is paying for the rest of the cost. Your child will need to wear long pants, closed toe shoes and be dressed for outside that day. Please send a sack lunch for the field trip. We are excited about this trip!