Earth Day

Wednesday April 22 was Earth Day!  Claire and I discovered that we had similar items for Sharing today…she brought her Curious George and I wore a Curious George shirt that I picked up while on my trip to Boston!

 We spent some time outside with the rest of the Northview All Stars cleaning up our school grounds.  We were surprised to see how much trash we collected.  We also felt really good doing something to help clean up the earth on this special day.  We were even lucky enough to sing the song "The Earth is My Home" to the fourth graders!

   

   

In Writer's Workshop, we continue to be our best selves as writers.  We are working so hard on our writing and make sure to write for our readers!

   

   

As you know, our students did not have school on Friday but the teachers did!  So, while the students were home, I set up our classroom incubator.  It is that time of year…our eggs arrive early next week and then we will spend the next 21 days watching and waiting.  With any luck at all, we will have a successful chick hatch in about three weeks.  Stay tuned!

Have a great weekend!

Curious George

This week, we have been learning LOTS about Curious George.  Curious George is one of our favorite characters.  We have read a few Curious George stories this week, but we also spent some time exploring Curious George books in our classroom.

   

   

   

We spent a lot of time talking about Curious George stories.  Many of us are familiar with stories about Curious George, but we are learning that there are lots more Curious George books out there!  We wrote about things that we are curious about in our Reader's Notebooks this week.  We also made a display for the hallway about these things...

We are learning how to draw Curious George.  In addition, during our Managed Independent Learning time this week, we may some pretty cute handprint monkeys.

  

   



They turned out so cute and look so great hanging in the hallway outside our classroom!

I want to give a special shout out to Mrs. Radermacher.  She is instrumental in our Managed Independent Learning running so smoothly every day and she always hangs our projects up and makes us take pride in our work.  Thank you, Mrs. Radermacher!  We appreciate all that you do for us!!!

Fine Dining

Today was the big day…our Dining Star award.  We got to have Fine Dining in the lunchroom today!!!  It was so fun and such a special experience for us.  Many thanks to Mrs. Becky Hanson, who works tirelessly to help all of our students be their BEST selves!  Mrs. Hanson is the person that arranges Fine Dining for our classes.  We would also like to thank the students from Ms. Moore's 5th grade classroom who assisted in the clean up process.  Enjoy some photos of this special occasion!

   

      

   

Measurement Fun with First Grade!

In Math, we have been learning about measurement.  We have been focusing on the importance of using standard units of measure when we measure something.  As luck would have it, Mrs. Putz's first graders have been working on the same thing and they visited our classroom to help us learn why using standard units of measure are important.

Mrs. Putz's class read the story "How Big is a Foot?" by Rolf Myller.  Then they acted it out for us.  The actors did an excellent job!

After the story, we paired up with a first grade partner and using our own feet, we measured the distance to places in our classroom.  For example, how many steps is it to Mrs. Kurt's desk?  The sink? The window?  We got our papers and set out to work.

We quickly discovered something…our numbers did not necessarily match!  How could that be since we were all counting our footsteps?

   

   

   

You see, we learned that our feet are different sizes.  If you have a larger foot, it takes you fewer footsteps to get from place to place.  And if you have a smaller foot, it takes more footsteps to get from one place to another.

This activity was great for a couple of reasons…the first graders helped us to understand that using a standard unit of measure is important to gather accurate information.  It is also really fun to see what first graders get to do because we will be first graders someday!

Thanks to Mrs. Putz and her awesome first graders for hanging out with us and doing this great activity with us!

Soiling and Washing Fabric

Our Science investigation on Wednesday was really fun…we actually soiled and washed fabric!  We started by talking about the clothing we were wearing and what happens to make things dirty.  And when our clothing gets dirty, how does it get clean?  Our little scientists each got a sample of fabric called muslin.  Next, we used craft sticks and soiled the fabric samples with ketchup, mustard and chocolate syrup.  

   

Now that the fabric was soiled, we needed to clean it.  We started by putting the fabric in plain water.  Although some of the stains got lighter, they did not go away.  We needed to try something else.  We added some laundry detergent to the samples and got some brushes and started to scrub!

   

The stains got much lighter but we needed to hang the fabric to dry so we could observe them more closely.

We discovered that the ketchup and chocolate syrup did come out of the fabric, but the mustard was a little more stubborn and we could still kind of see it.  Then, like all good scientists, we reported on our investigation in our Science notebooks.