September 26, 2015

 What a busy week we had!  It is a great feeling seeing so many students working hard on different works and projects.  We have wrapped up our first Literature Circle groups this week and it was very successful.  We will be starting the second round with the students choosing new books on Monday.  The students have really enjoyed having more opportunities to read together and discuss what they have read in a group.  There is a great excitement for reading in the classroom.

This week, the students wrote their first letters to their Kindergarten buddies.  Kindergarten buddies is a tradition in Morado, where each student has a Kindergartner in another classroom that they communicate with and get to know and help throughout the year.  They will be inviting their buddies to have lunch together in a couple of weeks.

A fun lesson we had this week was called the “Tree of Life.”  We have talked about how people like to organize things and scientists have organized all the living things on earth into different categories.  We made a tree out of students which each branch was based around a type of living thing like bacteria, algae, plants, and animals and how they were all connected to one common ancestor at the trunk.  Students also got to learn different examples from each of the kingdoms of life and their similarities and differences.

This also worked out nice because the upper elementary was out for most of the week on a field trip to Islandwood.  They came back with great pictures and amazing stories to tell.  They were also eager to share what they had learned on their trip about the natural world around them.  Some students took lower elementary students outside and showed them different plants around the school and surrounding wetlands and how to identify them.

We would like to remind everyone that this Friday, October 2nd, school will be closed for Goal-Setting conferences.  Please make sure you and your child are there during your conference time.  If you haven’t yet filled out the Goal-Setting forms, we have attached a copy of them to this email.  It is very important we get those before the conference to be better prepared for the meeting on Friday.

One last thing, we would like to invite parents to Morado’s Parent Education Night on Tuesday, September 29th from 6pm-8pm.  Childcare will be provided with a pizza dinner.  This year, we will be going over the Five Great Lessons that we do at the beginning of each school year.  This is a great way to get to experience some of the really cool things we get to do in our class and how we connect everything we do during the year to those five lessons.