September 18, 2016

I hope everyone had a great time at the Recess Monkey concert on Friday!  We have some very energetic dancers in our class.

This week in Morado, we started with the second Great Lesson "The Timeline of Life."  Continuing from the previous week's lessons about the beginning of the universe, this lesson focuses on just our planet and its history.  The second Great Lesson breaks down the eras of Earth's existence and the different qualities and life forms during that time period.  Students got to spread out the timeline and see how long the history of the entire planet has been and that only the very end of the timeline is where human history is.

We started most of our classroom specialists, with students learning about Spanish, song-writing, and practicing singing together in chorus.  P.E. will start next week.  We also started our Literature Circles by having students choosing 1 out of 6 different books to read over the next few weeks.  After they are finished they will meet with other students who have chosen that book and discuss different aspects of literature and their thoughts about the book.  It has been great seeing older students help read to new students with the longer books.  This week we also began reading The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe during lunch to prepare for our Seattle Children's Theater field trip next month.  Next week, students will have their first spelling pre-test on Monday and will be bringing home words to practice during the week.

Some lesson highlights from this week were a Noun Key Experience, an introduction to nouns and making lists of different nouns in the classroom with Mr. Ben and learning about geometric hierarchy with Ms. Mary and making larger and larger numbers.  Some students going as far as nonillion, which is 1 with 30 zeros after it!  Also with Mr. Ben, some older students did some practicing identifying different parts of speech in their own writing and Ms. Mary had students make graphs to show how many people are in their family and how old everyone is.
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Lastly, we would like to thank Sol's dad, who did a presentation with both the lower and upper elementary students about melting different metals and their applications.