Dear Families, We hope you are enjoying this lovely Sunday afternoon. We are looking forward to a wonderful week of poetry writing, math development, and character analysis in reading. We hope to see you all this Friday, December 19th for our school assembly and class party! Last week, we continued to explore our newest IB Unit through poetry writing and learning more about communication and expression in the animal kingdom. From ground squirrels to whales, students learned more about expression through echolocation, whale songs, and scents. We also studied the history of our state. To the left, you will see our students working together to locate our state on the globe. One student remarked, "Our state is so small, and we are so small to our state! What a big world we live in!" Students explored the varied habitats in New Jersey, learned interesting facts about the state, and shared their most beloved aspects about living here. Students will continue working with our classroom globe as we expand from learning about our city and state, to our region, country, hemisphere and so on. If you have a globe or map at home, consider showing your child places you have visited around the world or places of interest to you. As IB learners, we are always looking to learn and inquire into the world around us. With reading and writing this week, students continued to build their knowledge of poetry as a form of expression. Students sampled poems, including writings from Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky, in order to build their awareness of what poetry is, especially forms of poetry and styles. Just this week, students learned about color poetry, sensory poetry, and free verse. With a sample of poems, students worked in partnerships to read poems and sort them according to topic or style. For example, the often humorous writings of Jack Prelutsky found their way into the funny pile for many students. With these samples, students began to develop their own sense of poetry, especially forms they may be interested in writing. If you have a favorite poet or poem, we would love to know! Please send in any favorites with your student this week. During Parents' Day, students took time to share their poetry writing and process with parents. This was a very exciting moment for students to demonstrate their learning and collaborate with families. Heard around the writing tables: "I wrote with my mom during Parents' Day, it was really fun to have my mom at school" - Sebastian "I made a poem about something I love, well something that is important to me. I wrote with my dad, it was nice to think about winter." - Oliver "I enjoyed poetry, color poetry. Poetry is peaceful and nice. So I really really like spending time on it." - Ana Sofia "I liked poetry. I found it relaxing because you are thinking about what makes you happy, like colors that make you feel happy." - William "I did poetry writing. It is where you make poems and you get to think about the five senses, see, touch, smell, taste, and and hear." - Sarea "This week was Parents' Day and i wrote a poem with my dad. We made it pretty humorous, it was about Frostbite! It was really nice to write with him. He makes me laugh." - Polaris "We wrote poems with our moms and dads. We had to figure out what a poem was about by using evidence from our poem. Then we ate snack with our moms and dads, it was fun!" - Manaal In mathematics, students are continuing to develop their knowledge of fact families and multiplication. For our second grade students, developing their fact family knowledge will enable them to build a foundation upon addition and subtraction. As students begin to see relatioships between numbers, they will become more fluent with their aritmetic and mathematical processing. This will be of great benefit to them as we begin to move into addition and subtraction in the new year. Third grade continues to work on their "Dream House" project. This in-school project is helping students build an awareness of multiplication as a tool for life. Through the application of multiplication to determine a room's area and cost, students are actively growing their fluency with multiplication through an engaging activity. We look forward to presenting these projects to peers and parents in late January. "I learned about multiplication this week. It is helping me to build my multiplication dream house. It is something to help with learning the area. It is a challenge, but I like it. I like doing math on the iPad as well." - William "In math we are doing multiplication and dream houses. Each square costs either $50 or $100, and we need to stay within a budget." - Kaitlyn Finally, students worked together to finish up their PJS piggy bank. We hope to have Travi Jr. ready for our fundraisers by the end of the week! "I painted Travi Junior. It is a piggy bank for our PJS fundraisers. We named it Travi Jr. because it reminds us of Miss O's dog, Travi. I hope we raise lots of money this year." - Kyle As always, please contact us with any questions! We hope to see many of you this Friday for our classroom party and school assembly! Have a lovely week! Kindly, Britt and Anne |
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Good Morning!
We hope you are enjoying a lovely December Sunday as the rain has finally stopped! After enjoying a peaceful, restful, and relaxing Thanksgiving, the OK Corral was back at work! Just a few reminders for the rest of December... Britt and I cordially invite you to the OK Corral Parents Day on Thursday, December 11, 8:30-10am. Kindly RSVP by emailing one of us at [email protected] or [email protected] so we may have the appropriate number of materials needed.
In Reading this week, the second grade focused on fluency by solving tricky words and reading smoothly with expression, in order to understand what is being read. The students focused on paying attention to the punctuation marks on the page as punctuation marks are like traffic signals, letting us know to us what we need to do and how to do it. In third grade, the students began a brand new unit on poetry. This aligns with our new IB unit, “Individuals learn about themselves and the world through their relationships with others”. Students explored a variety of poems and discovered that poems come in many types, forms, and structures. The students were then posed with the question, "What is a poem". They will continue to explore and discover the answer to this question as they immerse themselves in the genre in the coming weeks. "I learned what to do with the punctuation. A period means it's the end of sentence. A question mark means to raise your voice at the end. An exclamation mark means to read it excitedly, and a comma means to take a breath!" ~ Kyle "Now I know how to use punctuation! It's helping me keep my roads smooth in my reading at home too!" ~ Ana Sofia "I know that when I read, I have to look at the punctuation. If I read it with a question mark, I have to raise my voice like this...Do you have a baby sister?" ~ Charlotte V. "WOW! There are a lot of different types of poems out there!" ~ Praslin In Writing this week, we celebrated our published pieces writing with one another. The students were able to observe their personal growth as writers by comparing the first published piece to the new published piece. The published pieces are displayed on the wall outside the OK Corral classrooms. Please stop by! You'll be glad you did. "I'm soooooooooo glad I finished my writing. I worked really hard on it and I learned how to use onomatopoeia to make my good writing even better." ~ Lily "I liked how we got to share our writing with each other. I was able to use onomatopoeia and sparkle words. In my writing, I used the word 'cling" because it was so quiet in church. I also showed how people had their phones ringing which they shouldn't do in church." ~ Myla "I loved reading about Isaac Presley to everyone. My historical fiction showed everyone that music is related to sound because music is sound!" ~ Isaac In Math this week, the second grade was introduced to number relationships (fact families) in order to build mental mathematical knowledge. Through the exploration of commutative properties, the students discovered that numbers are like our own families, and relate how they to one another. The third grade students were introduced to a new project entitled, "Design Your Dream House!". The students were asked to plan and design their dream house by using their mathematical knowledge of mathematical operations and measurement. The students were given a budget and building rules to plan. At the end of each math period, the students reflect on their progress with their project partner. "I didn't know that numbers were related to one another and that there are a family of numbers! Like, 7+1=8, 1+7=8, 8-1=7, and 8-7=1." ~ Sophia "It costs me $50 for each square foot of my normal rooms, like a bedroom, but I have to use $100 for each square foot a a 'special room'...it's a lot to figure out!" ~ Isaac I really like designing my own house. I have to figure out the cost of each room and make each room the actual size...my bedroom can't be the size of closet! ~ William "We had to write a kid contract! We each have $200,000 to use in our plan. We have to be careful with what we spend." ~ Jasmine We are excited to officially launch our new IB unit entitled, "Individuals learn about themselves and the world through their relationships with others" in the coming week. We will explore our own families, what do they look like and what being a part of family means. The Wizard of Oz auditions were a success! Many students from the OK Corral classroom felt butterflies on Friday morning as they auctioned not only for an acting part but for set crew as well. We know that this new and exciting endeavor will add a special spark to our PJS community. We look forward to it progressing in the weeks to come! "I practiced really hard on the script that Ms. Swartly and Ms. Pottinger gave me. I had butterflies!" ~ Micah "I had butterflies before I went in to audition, and I have butterflies after I auditioned!" ~ Makayla Wishing you a wonderful rest of the weekend, Anne & Britt |
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