St. Norbert Students Came to Visit

Today we had some St. Norbert future educators come to teach a lesson on the water cycle. They incorporated art, drama, and song to help the class remember the important vocabulary and steps in the water cycle process.

Informational Writers

The class has been working hard following the writing process. They began this unit by coming up with a topic that they felt they already knew a lot about and could teach it to someone else. The next step was to list 5 big ideas about their topic (this later became our table of contents). For each of those sections, they wrote long everything they knew. Once their sections were complete and we edited together, their job was to look over their writing with their informational writing checklist and make sure they could say 'YES' to each of the items. In google classroom, they have begun the process of publishing their text. They are copying in all of their information, and will then add in different text features to make their book appealing.

Text Features to Add:
pictures
captions
tables
diagrams
labels
timelines
bolded words for the glossary

Here they are in action this morning!

Fallen Timbers Presentation on Forests

Today we had an exciting afternoon with Mr. Tony (Ainsley's dad) from Fallen Timbers. He shared with us all of his knowledge on coniferous and deciduous trees. Have your child share with you tonight one difference between these 2 types of trees!

Deciduous trees are ones that shed their leaves every fall. These trees have broad leaves and hard wood or tree bark. To prepare itself for winter, these trees get rid of their leaves and go dormant.

Coniferous trees or conifers are trees that are evergreen or hold their needles are year long. These trees are shaped more like a triangle to help shed snow in the winter. Their needles hold in water to keep the tree going throughout the winter months. These trees are soft woods.

We were able to see so many different versions of each kind of tree in the forest right outside our front doors of Dickinson! Explore your neighborhoods by going on a walk this week! What do you notice about the leaves on the ground or still in the trees?

Dot and Dash

For a week, during our social studies time, we have the opportunity to work with Dot and Dash. These are programmable robots. The class is working with small groups, their robot, and an ipad in order to program the robots to finish various challenges. Today the class went through "driving school" to make sure they were familiar enough to code the robots. Tomorrow, they will begin with some pretty neat challenges! 

Check them out below in action!

Special Guest Day!

What a special day it was! It was wonderful to have all the student's special people come and spend some time in our classroom. I can see that they each have a wonderful support system!

Here is snippet of their songs from the concert. Enjoy!

Publishing our Personal Narratives

We have gone through the writing process with our narratives. The class began by choosing their seed story. They needed to make sure that they were the main character in their story. Then we created a plan. We listed our setting, people, and 4 important events. We began by drafting in our notebooks. We wrote each event long with many details and dialogue. After each event (these became our paragraphs), we stopped, dropped, and indented and began with a transitional phrase. After the students finished drafting, they edited with me. We checked for a beginning, middle, and end. I checked for spelling and also the proper use of quotation marks and paragraphes. We also checked to make sure every paragraph didn't start with THEN. That makes for a boring story! :)

Now we are busy bees, typing away to publish our first stories of the year. They have worked so hard on these and I cannot wait for them to show you the final product!