Science Experiments

      It continues to be a busy time in our classroom. Much of our math, reading, and writing work has remained the same, but students have been doing some fun and exciting work in Science lately involving "experiments." The first experiments had to do with force and motion. One involved building classroom versions of mini-golf holes and the other involved creating and testing ramps for toy cars. Now we are moving on to Science work involving plants. We planted seeds in plastic bags with different variables. One bag has everything a seed may need to grow while other bags are missing one or more things (the seeds have soil, air, and sun but no water or the seeds have water and sun but no soil or air). It will be interesting to see the results.

Unified Arts Update:

PE - Students have been doing a lot of different things lately including beginning tennis skills, scootering, and other exercises.

Enrichment - Students learned two new techniques for creating more complex domino setups and were able to choose from stations including dominoes, coding, drawing, wool work, and symmetry practice.

Music - Students are learning to sing songs that the whole school is learning.

Art - Students were able to watercolor paint on their clay pieces that they created earlier in the year.

Spanish - Students are continuing to learn more about Peru and practice their Spanish language skills.

Library - Students listened to a read aloud and tried out some coding practice on iPads before picking out new library books.

Welcome back!

It was great to welcome students back today after an extended winter break! 

This post includes some reading pictures 

and rollerblading pictures from right before vacation.

Unified Arts Update:

PE -  Students were able to use rollerblades, scooters, ripsticks, or longboard skateboards.

Music - Students did singing and more work with ukuleles.

Snowflakes and Snow Days

      We have been wrapping things up this week leading up to our winter vacation. Students were able to present their nonfiction writing research projects on animals. Classmates taught each other about penguins, axolotls, cats, snakes, and kangaroos. It was great to see students proud of the work they completed! Students have also continued to work hard in reading and math. In reading they are daily working on improving their skills. In math they are reviewing telling time with analog clocks and completing appropriate math problems and computation for their own individual abilities.

We also celebrated our 100th day of school this week!

Unified Arts Update:

PE - Students have been doing a lot of different things lately as the weather has not cooperated for ice skating. These include roller blading, tag games, knee scooters, basketball, and running relays.

Enrichment - We have been missing our Enrichment time to go skiing at Cochran's.

Music - Students have begun learning about the ukulele and are even getting the opportunity to learn how to play the instrument!

Art - Students have continued to learn about mazes and have been creating different kinds of mazes.

Spanish - Students watched a video about outdoor markets in Latin America and learned about bartering.

Library - Students have completed hearing read alouds of all the Red Clover nominee books so they did a review activity about the books and then voted for their favorite.

Snow Motion

      Over the last few weeks students in our class have been able to learn and/or practice the skill of skiing. Our PE teacher Mr. G has a program set up where students go to Cochran's, a small ski experience hill we are lucky to have right here in Richmond. Students with no experience skiing began the first week just learning how to maneuver around on their skis and how to stop. Other students were able to quickly show the skills they have and move on to larger parts of the mountain. As the weeks have progressed many students have improved their skills. It has been great to see!