Week 31

Happy Easter, everyone! It was good to be back at school this week. Here's what we did:

Recognizing Emotions. In Superhero Social Skills this week we focused on learning to recognize emotions. That meant that we would look for body signals in each other as well as for clues in the environment or situation to help us determine how someone is feeling. We played some fun charade games and watched some familiar videos but stopped frequently to noticed the emotions of the main characters. Sorry I don't have the videos for this unit posted--I can't get the CD to work on my computer for some reason. I will post it as soon as I can get things figured out.

Book Fair. This week the Scholastic Book Fair was open after school. I hope you all had a chance to go look at it!

Landforms. In science we began studying landforms--natural and unique shapes in the earth--such as archipelagos, beaches and canyons. We studied not only what they are, but where we can find examples of them in the United States. See if your child remembers with U.S. state is an archipelago or where the Grand Canyon is.

Easter celebrations. On Friday we had some Easter fun. For art we made some cute paper Easter baskets.

We also did some cooking and put together our own "bunny mix" (similar to a Chex party mix). I tell you, so many of our students just love cooking. I love it too--it provides a great opportunity for some basic reading skills, direction following, and we always do some comprehension at the end of the activity.

For reading that day, we had a reading challenge Easter egg hunt. Inside each egg was a reading question that the students had to answer in order to find out where the next egg was. It was so much fun, they hardly even noticed that they were doing academic work! Here are a couple of pictures of the hunt (sorry we couldn't get everyone!):

In addition to the clues, each egg also contained a few different kinds of "jelly beans". Once everyone had finished with their egg hunt, we sorted the jelly beans in to four categories and practiced making predictions about what each jellybean would taste like. Some students were definitely surprised! We had sour beans, fruity beans, chocolate beans and hot & spicy beans. But EVERYONE was brave enough to try each one.

In P.E. we also had an egg relay race, where students had to balance plastic eggs on their spoons.

Coming Up:

Next week is Spirit Week

Monday - Hat Day
Tuesday - Pajama Day
Wednesday - Crazy Hair Day
Thursday - Twin/Decade Day
Friday - School Spirit Day

Next week we will also be doing a LOT of testing. SAGE testing will resume for some of our 4th graders - science, this time. We will also be doing some UAA testing for 3-4th graders who are not taking the SAGE test.

Homework Heroes:

JUSTIN

BRODY

CARSON

KAI

SEAN

ELIAS

Student of the Week:

Dallen!!

FOR EXCELLENT BEHAVIOR IN INCLUSION.

Mrs. D

P.S. I had to include this picture here:

This is us, hiding.

On April Fool's Day we played a little joke on Dallen and Mrs. W as they came back from class. We turned the lights off and everyone stood by the wall next to the door, very quietly. When they walked in the room, pretty confused, we all said, "April Fool's!" Everyone got a kick out of it, including Dallen, who initially jumped several feet in the air.