December Mix

Enjoy some winter music to get into the holiday season!

Week of November 24th

This week was very short. We only had school for a full day on Monday and then a half a day on Tuesday because of Parent/Teacher Conferences. Both days we worked on some researching of the first Thanksgiving. We performed a Reader's Theatre play and really enjoyed that. Tuesday, some representatives from the American Cancer Society came to talk to us about the dangers of smoking. We also started our reserach on our Winter Celebration, Bodhi Day. Each classroom at Washington School is given a Winter Holiday to research and create a display for the rest of the school. Our celebration will be December 18th. Members of the Schiller Park community are welcome to come out and see what we have learned. Bodhi Day is a Buddhist holiday in which the Buddhists celebrate Buddha's enlightenment. We started to think about how we want to present this information to the school and what we want to create. It will be a fun project to work on in December.
Ms. Olszewski will be our new teacher from now until April as Mrs. Choudhary is ready to start her maternity leave. We will still keep you updated with what's happening in our classroom. :) Happy Thanksgiving!!

Week of November 17, 2008

This week was a very hectic week for us at Washington School. It was a week that was very abnormal. We took Common Assessments, so we did a lot of reviewing in math and reading all week. On Monday we met Ms. Olszewski who will be taking over for Mrs. Choudhary when she has her baby. Ms. Olszewski stayed with us all day and worked with us in small groups to get to know us better. Thursday we had a very special day. All morning we had special guests who came in to do Junior Achievement with us. They taught us about geography and having a small business. We learned about profits and costs and we were even able to play some games that went along with our businesses. In the afternoon, Kennedy School (where we went to preschool-3rd grade) welcomed us back for an ice cream treat. They told us we did so well on our ISAT's last year that they wanted us to come back so we could celebrate. We had vanilla ice cream with all kinds of toppings: chocolate chips, m&m's, whip cream, chocolate syrup, strawberry syrup, and sprinkles. We really had a treat! Today we are at the Lincoln Park Zoo studying our animal groups and animal adaptations. If we have some good pics, we'll post them so you can see what we were up to! It's chilly out there, so we are glad we came in our winter coats, hats, scarves, and gloves!
Next week we have a really short week. We will be here all day Monday and then only a half of a day Tuesday because of Parent Teacher Conferences. Wednesday-Friday we will be on Thanksgiving Break. If we do not post next week, you'll hear from us in December!

The Week of November 10th

On Tuesday, we celebrated Veterans' Day. We were celebrating all of the Veterans who help keep the United States free and safe. The Chorus of Washington School sang in the gym for a special assembly. Many important people, including some veterans from Schiller Park came to our assembly.

Last night was Sports Night. We played badminton and had a fitness challenge. We had pretzels and graham crackers for a snack because we played so hard.

Some people received a Frank and Iggy Bronze brick for earning 50 points on their AR quizzes, and were able to read with Ms. Kopta's dogs today, Frank and Iggy. Our first two earners of Bronze Frank and Iggy bricks were Riya and Albi! Congratulations to them both and we hope to have more students reading with the pups soon!

In Science, we are writing about different animals. We are reporting on an animal's group, habitat, if they are an invertebrate or vertebrate, 6 or more interesting facts, and all of their adaptations. We were able to choose our own animal to reserach and then study about it. We are now choosing our own project to create about that animal.

In P.E. class, we are learning how to play basketball. We were shooting and dribbling the ball around the cones in stations. In Art, we were using water colors to paint pictures of whatever we want. In Music, we are learning how to play the keyboards. Gerardo tells us that he is learning how to play Batter Up on the keyboard. He thinks it's easy! :)

In Reading, we played on Study Island today. We were working on drawing inferences with the text. We can play different games while we answer questions such as Sling Shot, Bowling, and Ski Lift. If you check out our website, you can link to Study Island. Sorry...you'll need a password and a username to get in!

In Writing, we started doing essays on what we observe and what we realize. We wrote a whole class on essay how raising our hands in school gives everyone a fair chance. We also wrote an essay on the story, Teammates by Tiki and Ronde Barber. We learned to stretch our thinking by using sentences that start with "For example...", "I realize...", "Many people think...but I think", and "This is important because".

In Math, we are learning about factors, primes, square numbers, and multiples. We are using square inch tiles to help us see this clearly. Yesterday we learned how to make prime factorization trees to find the the prime factors of a number. We are also continuing our multiplcation time tests! Some people are really studying hard for those!!

In Social Studies, we are watching a video about what happened during the Boston Massacre. We learned that a gun accidently went off and killed someone. This led to the French and Indian War. The colonists needed to be taxed on the tea, paper, and ink. They taxed them on these things so they could pay for the war. The colonists were dressed like American Indians during the Boston Tea Party and dumped all of the tea into the sea.

Week of November 3rd

This week in reading we worked on plot diagrams and different types of conflict. We used our books to determine the introduction, the rising action, climax, falling action, and the resolution of stories. We also talked about four different types of conflict in stories: character vs. character, character vs. nature, character vs. society, and character vs. himself/herself. We also did centers about homonyms. Homonyms are words that are spelled the same and sound the same but have different meanings. In Writing, we started our new unit on Essays. We worked this week on making observations and then thinking about our realizations about our observations. In Science, we played a game to help us learn what animals need to survive. It was a game of chance with rolling a die. If we rolled certain numbers, our animals would receive food, water, or shelter. If we rolled for all three needs, an offspring was born. If we did not roll for all three needs, one would die. We also started learning about animal adaptations. We worked on a center activity with our partner matching an animal with it's adaptation to help it survive. In Math, we worked with rectangular arrays. We arranged square tiles into rectangles in various ways. For example, we learned that we can make a 1x24, 2x12, 3x8, or a 4x6 size rectangle all from 24 square tiles! Next week we will begin to see how this connects to factors and multiples. In Social Studies we continued to learn about colonization. Most exciting of all this week was that we were able to watch a video recording of President Elect Obama's victory speech. We talked about how historical this week has been! Some day when our children are sitting in our seats in school they are going to read about this day in their Social Studies books, and we will be able to say that we lived through it! How amazing!

November Mix

Week of October 31, 2008

We had such a busy week last week that we did not have time to blog. Friday was Halloween, and at our school we have a parade in our costumes at the end of the day. We were so busy getting everything done before our Halloween celebration that we did not post! Anyway, in Reading we worked on Plot Diagrams. We watched an episode of The Emperor's New School and we determined the introduction, the rising action, the climax, the falling action, and the resolution of the episode. We also learned that homonyms are words that are spelled and pronounced the same way, but have two different meanings. For example, the word pool can be a game or a place to swim. In Writing, we finished up our second unit of study on Personal Narratives. We celebrated our fabulous writing on Friday by reading our favorite parts to each other and complimenting each other on the good points of our writing. In Math, we worked on place value. We used our place value to add and subtract numbers. We even worked on some word problems that help us use math in real life. In Science we created webs about the 6 different types of animals and their traits. We worked with our partner and were able to determine our own grade by how much work and effort we put into the project. Finally, we were really excited Friday afternoon to meet our principal, Miss Kopta's new baby, Emily Carol! She had the baby a couple of weeks ago and she brought her in to see us in our costumes. We had a great week! Check in again at the end of the week for an update on the beginning of Novemeber!