This week’s theme was Earth Day. We learned about reducing, reusing, and recycling. We went outside to pick up the litter and even turned off our lights on Thursday to save energy. We also made two cute Earth Crafts!

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Writing: 

We used everything we knew about writing to write a series of how-to books! One student gave an example of playing basketball, how-to dribble, and how to shoot. These books helped students teach others about a topic they know a lot about! We finished the week by working on publishing our how-to books!

Phonics: 

This week we continued working with our vowels and their sounds. We learned that each vowel has two different sounds – long and short vowels! We also continued working with diagraphs which are letters that go together to make one sound. We will continue to work on these critical topics throughout the year. Soon we will finish our phonics unit and have a special celebration now that we have vowel power. 

Reading: 

As we finished a part of the unit, we began to work with non-fiction books as avid readers by noticing the differences and similarities in our books. We also started a new bend that introduced us more to poetry! We are learning a special April Poem to help us learn about poem ideas. 

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Math: 

This week in math, we worked on skip counting and using pan balances to level objects out, figuring out how to make things equal the same weight, and seeing this in our pan balance. 

Science: 

We started a new science unit this week! We will be learning about living and non-living things! We began by talking about what all living things needs and how we can sort them as things that we can put some kind in a plastic box and what we cannot. Soon we will be working with worms and studying them in our classroom. 

Ms. Tracz’s last day

We will celebrate Ms. Tracz and say goodbye to her on Friday afternoon. The money that you graciously donated was able to get Ms. Tracz a Lakeshore gift card and a laminator with lamination film. 

Tuesday Field Trip 

We will go to the farm on Tuesday; please dress for the weather. We will be back in time for lunch. We will leave at 9:30 and come back at 12. Unfortunately, we will miss music and gym on Tuesday. I am sorry that we are only allowed three chaperones. I know that a lot of people wanted to come. I have good news in May; we are going to the West Bloomfield Nature Center to learn more about science.