March 4th-8th

Hello parents! We had an awesome week in the classroom between learning about Pablo Picasso and starting our Passion Projects.  Passion Projects will begin taking up most of our Daily 5/literacy time and you can read below about what we are doing to get started.

March 12th: Field trip to the Laurel's Nursing Home

March 14th and 15th: No school...teacher workdays

April 11th 10:00 AM: Artist in Me Gallery Crawl

April 15th-22nd: Spring Break

***Carpool: If there is a change during the school day to your child's afternoon pickup plan, please call the CSD front desk and they will relay the message to me.  I don't always have time to check my email during the day and I would hate to put your child on the bus when they are supposed to do carpool or vice versa.

Math:
We finished wrapping up with ten more/ten less, one more/one less.  I realized that some students needed some extra time to practice this skill so we continued another week of it before moving onto the next concept.  This week we will begin learning about time!  Like I mentioned in the blog last week, we learn time to the hour and half hour.  We also are continuing to work on addition and subtraction with higher numbers, the hundreds chart and the patterns that exist within it, and understanding word problems.

Literacy:
We continued with our guided reading groups on Tuesday like normal but the rest of our literacy time during the week was devoted to Passion Projects.  The beginning stages are the toughest as we are trying to set the students up for success in this research project.  The first step that we take is pull each child one-on-one and come up with "subtopics" for their topic.  Each subtopic will be a page in their bare book and will include page of writing and a page of illustrations.  For example, if someone chose "the ocean" as their topic some subtopics could be layers of the ocean, a list of ocean animals, dolphins, sharks, jellyfish, the 5 oceans of the world, waves and currents, etc.  Each child brainstormed this with us and we wrote all of them down so that we can begin working on them in the next few weeks.  The plan is to work on Passion Projects on Wednesday and Thursdays during out literacy time.

Thematic:
We started our Artist in Me unit this week and we began with learning about Pablo Picasso.  We are also learning the "Picasso Polka" that we will sing during our gallery crawl on April 11th.  The kids love it!  We learned the Picasso loved painting funky faces, blue artwork, rose artwork, cubism, and loved to tie in math into his artwork.  We learned that as he transitioned through different phases of his life, his style of artwork also changed.  Below are the centers that the students rotated through:
1. Students illustrated a book about "How To Find a Picasso" piece of artwork
2. Students created the famous Picasso painting of a rooster and they used chalk and oil pastels
3. Students created different shades of blue using blue, white, and black to create a "blue period" of a time they were sad
4. Students played "Roll a Picasso" where they rolled a dice and had to draw a face, ears, eyes, mouth, and nose to create a "funky face" like Picasso did

Thanks to our mystery reader today, Christina McConnell!  The kids are loving this parent activity.  There are still a few spots left so sign up on the Sign Up Genius that I sent out if you are interested.

Have a wonderful week!
Love,
Mrs. James