May 26, 2015

Good afternoon parents.  I shared some information with the children today that affects them on Tuesdays for the remainder of the year.  Unfortunately, Mrs. Magra is still dealing with the side effects of her concussion and has been told by her physician to not return to work for the next many weeks.  As a result, Mrs. Hoock will be in for her (this Friday, and then every Tuesday until the end of the year).  The children have had Mrs. Hoock in the past, so it's great that we will have a familiar face in the classroom.

Here's what we did today:

1. Opening Exercises - the children worked on some sentences on the board that had a lot of errors in them
2. Bible - I used one of Mrs. Magra's 'The Bible with Buck Rogers' lessons today.  The video series is pretty fun!  They sure make the stories come to life for the kids, and although I heard a few complainers, I noticed many times that everyone was glued to the story.  Today they learned about 1 Samuel, and Saul and David and their roles as kings.
3. Math - the Grade 3's worked on related addition and multiplication sentences while the 4's worked on multiplying 2 digits by one digit.  
4. S.S. - the class had 20 minutes to work on their gameboards
5. Library - everyone was asked to ensure that they have a chapter book to read in class.  Some students forgot their library books today, so I've asked them to be sure to bring them back tomorrow and I'll take them down to get a chapter book tomorrow.
6. P.E. - I don't often get a big chunk of P.E. time with the kids, so today was great.  We did a fitness warm up, with running, pushups, sit ups, jumping jacks, and burpees.  Then on to a fun game together for the remainder of the time.
7. Science - What a fun class we had today, experimenting with natural dyes!  Part of our unit right now is about finding uses for plants and we definitely did that today.  I presented the students with a variety of different plant items that might dye things, and they were asked to predict which they thought would dye things most effectively.  You'll have to ask your child about the results of their hypothesis.  We emphasized that it didn't matter if their hypothesis was proven right or wrong, and that this is all part of Science experiments.  The most important part to me is that they learned something, which I'm sure they all did.

I'll see everyone tomorrow! :)