Week #24 February 17-21, 2020

We love to sing and dance!  I learned a lot about our class watching them each with a microphone in their hand belting out their favorite tunes with our Karaoke celebration.  What a fun way to start our week and create happy memories together!  Here are a few pictures of some of our performances.

Students also thoroughly enjoyed their work with BeeBots and Mrs. Courcelle.  They learned to program their bee robots and have them travel across shower curtain maps of the United States.  Teams worked together to complete the challenges.  They were so appreciative, and kept thanking Mrs. Courcelle for the opportunity.

Two more Flat Stanleys arrived this week.  They returned from visiting North Carolina and Orchard Elementary.  Thank you again to family and friends for supporting our work!

Other things to ask your child about this week:

• "Vacuuming" our classroom with tape
• Reading lessons focused on character change with Peter's Chair, Dancing in the Wings and Brave Irene
• Being "employed" as members of the Vowel Task Force
• Pretend & Plan as we made items for our state float based on our research
• A guidance lesson with Ms. Amblo about paying forward small, ordinary acts of kindness

Enjoy this time with your family, and I look forward to seeing everyone in March.
Mrs. Hock

Week #23 February 10-14, 2020

We have a lot of pictures to share from many "sweet" happenings this week.  We'll start with the sweet start to our Friday and work backwards chronologically.

We had a wonderful start to our day on Valentine's Day!  The students were very sweet, and excited, as they politely and energetically exchanged valentines, and enjoyed breakfast together.  Thank you to all families who contributed items and thank you to our chefs, servers and clean up crew:  Mrs. Abrahamson, Mrs. Kutler, Mr. Kunz, Ms. Porter, Mrs. McGibney, Mrs. Thibault, Mrs. Molinari, and Mrs. Ebbers.  I really appreciated all the efforts to help the breakfast run so smoothly! The rest of our day was just as lovely too.

We received a sweet  collection of Flat Stanleys in the mail this week.  They returned from Connecticut, California, New Jersey, Winooski and Burlington.

We enjoyed a sweet Marky Mark celebration by having a picnic in our classroom for lunch.  We also watched the audio of Scrambled States of America Talent Show.

We made sweet confetti slaw with Miss Kayli and Miss Georgia in Farm-to-School.  Purple veggies are good for our brain!

We started work on our sweet float project by painting our boxes on Monday.  Thank you to Kate Lane for braving the world of tempera with 7 & 8 year olds!

Other things to ask your child about this week:
*our sweet trip to The Flynn Theater to see "Rainbow Fish"--very cool black lighting and puppetry
*using a few sweet websites for our state research:  Nat Geo Kids, Maps of World and geology.com
*learning to spell words we love
*flags of the world with fractional amounts of red
*"compare" versus "take away" math problems

Stay warm and enjoy the weekend!
Mrs. Hock

Week #22 February 3-7, 2020

Happy 100th day of school!  Here we are 100 days smarter, kinder and braver.  What did we do related to this special day?

• built or designed with 100 pattern blocks
• read a poem entitled "The 100th Day"
• counted 100 tens
• solved problems within 100
• colored patterns within 100
• 100th Day Worries

Mail keeps arriving. We are excited each day to see which Flat Stanley returns to us at school.  This week we received mail from Maryland, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and New York.  Some of these Stanleys even traveled to other states with the hosts who entertained them.  Our family and friends out of state are certainly being creative and taking their host job seriously!

In geography this week, we studied and analyzed US maps about regions and natural resources.  We also began our state research.  This was very exciting as we gathered as a whole grade level to learn our assigned state, sing "Fifty Nifty" and see a model of our parade float project.  We will continue this research the next 2 weeks and also create items to adorn our float in preparation for our parade on March 6. 

Other things to ask your child about this week:

• morning meeting games:  Cual Es La Regla? and Veo, Veo
• our Kindness Alphabet Book
• two different types of subtraction situations--take away or compare
• strategies to spell multi-syllabic words:  start with the biggest part, use syllables, focus on vowels and compare sound patterns to words we already know
• our guidance lesson with Ms. Amblo and Ms. Kirsty about caring for babies

Enjoy and be safe this snowy weekend!

Mrs. Hock

Week #21 January 27-31, 2020
Writing, Cheering and Mapping, Oh My!

This week we celebrated our non-fiction writing with "Publishing Party Positives & a Pair of Pops"!  I chose this catchy title for our celebration, just like our authors chose catchy titles for their books:  Pumping Facts About Blood, and Throwing in Facts About Football to name a few.  We read each other's books and wrote positives for feedback about their lead, details, organization, pictures and spelling.

Wednesday's field trip to UVM to watch the women's basketball game was a lot of fun.  We were great fans!  Thank you to Elliott and Faiza for representing our class on center court.  We enjoyed snacks from Mr. Coon, activity packets from the UVM team, our bag lunches, quick entertainment & music during timeouts and Zumba at halftime.

We've received mail!  Seven Flat Stanleys have returned from New York, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Florida, Texas and Richmond, Vermont. How exciting!  This is an amazing way to support our learning of US Geography as we learn about the states our Flat Stanleys have visited. This week we also colored and analyzed physical maps of the United States as well as a map of our country's 58 National Parks.

Send in those boxes!  We are collecting the boxes and lids that hold reams of photocopy paper.  If you have any at home or work, please send them in.  We'll need one box for each student.

Other things to ask your child about this week:

• Yes Day!
• Alexander Who Used to be Rich Last Sunday (for math in both English and Spanish)
• guidance lesson with Ms. Kirsty and Ms. Amblo about body parts
• "Fifty Nifty United States"
• phonics lessons focused on words' tails--doubling consonants before adding endings, plural with s or es, changing y to i and -tion
• Our Kindness books:  Giving Tree, A Sick Day for Amos McGee and The Last Stop on Market Street

Have a wonderful weekend!

Mrs. Hock