Week 31 (April 13-17)

April 13 – 17 (Week 31)

“Learn to be open minded and respectful to people’s opinions, even when you don’t agree!”

-Unknown

We’ve been talking a lot about fact and opinion lately! The conversation started when one of the kids stated matter-of-factly “teachers aren’t allowed to have tattoos” and another kid retorted with “yes they can because Ms. Tinsley has lots”! They were right, I do have tattoos but most are not visible. However the first student made a great point that we don’t typically think of teachers with tattoos, but this ignited a very important conversation around why we think that certain people should or shouldn’t have tattoos. This then led into what is considered a fact and what is considered an opinion and whose matters! This goes wonderfully with our standards on opinion writing! We will be working more with opinion writing in the upcoming weeks!

Science

We’ve begun our weather journey! We are slowly becoming young meteorologists! Each student has his or her own weather journal where they are recording the daily forecast and noting new weather terms, severe weather, and weather tools. The kids also had the opportunity to meet Dr. Doug and learn even more about weather. They found Dr. Doug very entertaining and learned some safety tips as well!

Time and Money

As we’ve studied time and money alongside one another, I’ve noticed that students are either grasping one or the other, but not both. This allows me to monitor and adjust my teaching! I believe that we will spend all of next week focusing on money and then the following week focus solely on time! The kids find both very fascinating and want to know more about each!

Sharing

I believe our favorite part of the day has become share time! Each day a student shares a read aloud with the class and another student shares a piece from his or her writer’s notebook! It’s amazing to watch the kids hop up on the stool and teach us through their writing or reading! The kids learn so much from their peers and it is such a beautiful experience to watch them muster up the courage to present their work to the class!

Speaking of reading, we had a few surprise readers in our class on Friday! Friday morning Mrs. Griggs came in to read Ivan: The Remarkable True Story of the Shopping Mall Gorilla! As you all know, earlier this year we read the chapter book The One and Only Ivan. The kids were able to make so many connections between the two books! It was such an amazing experience to watch and the kids always love surprise visits from Mrs. Griggs. Also Ms. Junor spent some time with us after recess and read a chapter from our newest read aloud Stella by Starlight! She is such an animated reader. She had the kids hanging on to her every word. I can’t wait to see what surprise readers we have next!