Germs, Germs, and a Do Over!

Wow!  Although there is still a small handful of students out today, we are just going to pretend that last week never happened - and have a total "Do Over"!  A very special "Thank you" to Mrs. Bay, who subbed for me all of last week.  It is very difficult to be out and create quality sub plans; and Mrs. Bay did a great job keeping things going.  Not only has our classroom been sanitized (repeatedly), but students have had frequent reminders and lessons on covering coughs and sneezes, hand washing, and sanitizing often.  Hopefully we are through the worst of it, and we can move forward from here.

**  Donations of tissues and disinfecting wipes are welcome!!!  **

Book Orders went home today.  They are due this Friday, January 18. For those of you who are still out sick (or on vacation), you can still place an order online.

In math we are finishing up a unit on data collection, representation, and analysis.  Students have participated in, and created their own, surveys.  Students have learned how to make various representations of their data - a picture, graph, or other way of organizing and making sense of the data.  Students also have been learning about analyzing the data - seeing what can be learned by looking at the data.  We also used made up alien-like creatures called "Yektiis" (YEK-tees) to learn about attributes and sort items using more than one "rule".  Venn Diagrams came in handy when an object fit two rules at the same time.  We will spend a little more time on data collection, learning about line plots and more about analyzing data, before we move on to our next unit where we will look at number patterns, ratios, and learn to represent and predict change.

Mrs. Bay introduced the class to a mini-unit on Martin Luther King, Jr.  School is closed on Monday, January 21 in honor of Dr. King.  It is important that students have a little background on the civil rights issues and peaceful ways of dealing with conflict that Dr. King was passionate about. 

We are starting a unit in science on the physical science topics of the moon, sun, earth, and weather.  We will also take a look at the water cycle in this unit.  Students will perform some experiments in order to grasp the ideas of the size of the moon compared to the earth and sun, the way that the earth orbits around the sun -  and the moon around the earth, understand moonlight and craters.  We will then move on to learn more about the sun and weather, weather's affect on the earth's surface, and the water cycle.  We probably will not finish this unit before the end of the quarter.

In Writing Workshop this month, students are learning more about conferencing and the benefits of teacher- and peer-conferences.  We are using mentor texts to explore ways in which we can make our writing flow (as opposed to sounding choppy).  As always, we work with using a variety of strategies for planning our writing, adding detail to our stories, and thinking about the "mechanics" of writing such as spelling, upper case letters, and punctuation.  Some students are even ready to consistently use quotation marks in their work, when using dialogue.