Blog Madness!

National Turn Your TV Off Week is coming up next week - April 19 - 23.  The Manatee class will be participating in our annual challenge to keep our TV turned off all week.  The class be singing this song, Gotta Keep Reading in the classroom every day. A coupon book will be coming home in the Wednesday Go-Home Envelope.  Thre is a coupon for each day of the week, along with a packet of information.  Every day your child does not watch TV, please send in the corresponding coupon, signed by you, to school.  We will create a graph to observe our progress over the week.  Our class will be competing with other classes for an ice cream party.  We are also challenging the Manatees to bring in 175 coupons.  Good Luck!

                            Family Journals

Students will using their composition notebooks as Family Journals for the rest of the school year.  The purpose of the journal is for students to practice letter-writing skills by corresponding with a family member.  Your child will write the first letter to a family member, bring it home, and that family member will write to respond.  This Friday, April 16th will be the first day of letter-writing.  Your child will bring their Family Journal home on Friday. You will have the weekend to reply to their letter.  They will bring it back to school on Monday, and write an answer back.  You will have three days to write in response.  (Directions and examples will be attached to the inside of the notebook). 
This will be the regular cyclic schedule:  Family Journals on Mondays and Fridays, writing to prompts on Wednesday mornings, and math reviews on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  This will be our second year of using Family Journals.  The students love the authentic audience.  Happy Writing!

Happy April, Happy Spring!

There is a lot of excitement and new learning this month in the Manatee Classroom. 
Students are busy writing poetry, learning about insects, and practicing cooperation, which is our current character development theme. 

We are in need of more healthy snacks to feed our hungry manatees.

The students are eating up a storm!  Thank you for your kind donations.

Our yearly Poetry Celebration will be on Thursday, April 29th at 6:30.  Our theme is
Keep A Poem in Your Pocket, in honor of the celebrated day.  Students will share creative poems they have written, and recite the poem, Keep A Poem in Your Pocket,
by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers with their classmates.  Please join us for this fun literacy event!
In addition, students will share their Private Eye Poetry/Art exhibit.  By using 5X jewelers loupes, they are "zooming in" on objects like shells, coins, insects, flowers, etc. to gain a different perspective.  Students then draw the "new" view of their object, and finally write a metaphoric poem to describe their drawing.  This activity was taken from the Puget Sound Writing Project. 

Insects! Our classroom has blossomed into an entemologist laboratory.  Our students are observing ladybugs, crickets, milkweed bugs, and mealworms.  Some mealworms have reached the final stage of the metamorphosis cycle of adult.  This is what they look like at that stage, when they evolve into Darkling Beetles.  Our most recent arrivals have been caterpillars (larva).  Students will watch them morph into chrysalis (pupa), and then adult Painted Lady butterflies during the next few weeks.  We will have a butterfly release event to free the adults. 

We also have a new class pet.  In addition to Goldie, our goldfish, we now have a very interesting axolotl water salamander.  The students have named him "Speedy!"

Field Trip
Now that our students are becoming such experts on insects, we plan to broaden their horizons with new experiences and a larger variety of "bugs."  We will be going on a field trip to the Seattle BugSafari sometime in May.  We will keep you posted on the date and price. 

Upcoming Events

Jump Rope for Heart - Thursday, April 15th