Sterling's Snippets: Spring is in the air?

Wow! It sure feels like Spring today! I hope you are enjoying these nice days, while they last! Winter will return at the end of the week, so please continue to send winter gear.

We had a blast on Valentine's Day with a simple day of Valentine stations, science experiments and games. Check out the kiddos in action!

Has your first grader told you about our special classroom guests? We welcomed Victoria Smith, an NDSU student in her sophomore year, to our classroom for a 40 hour practicum. Ms. Smith is enjoying seeing first graders in action. She is reading and playing math games with students. Ms. Smith will continue to be with us on Tuesday and Thursday mornings for a few more weeks. Students also began Junior Achievement. This year Junior Achievement is being taught by VCSU Juniors. We are lucky to have 3 students teaching our students each Wednesday for five weeks.

We celebrated another birthday this month! Happy 7th Birthday, Pyper!

A Peek at the Week

Reading: This week we will finish reading about a trip to the moon. The students will also read a biography on Mae Jemison and locate text features within the text. Students acted as reporters last week, interviewing an imaginary astronaut. They practiced asking and answering questions with this task. Students will learn about compound sentences this week in grammar and /ee/ and /ea/ vowel teams in phonics.

Math: In math students are working on addition and subtraction to 20. We recently learned the doubles, doubles +1 and making 10 strategies. We have been caught singing our "Doubles" rap, and Mr. Carlson even came in to watch us in action!

Science: In science we are learning about the sun. Students practiced making shadows last week with flashlights, recording their observations in their science notebooks. Next week we will learn about sun safety.

Writing: Would you rather swim in a pool of snakes or spiders? This is just one of the opinion questions that was posed to students during an activity titled "Would you rather?" Students are working hard on writing a paragraph (that's right, a paragraph) piece stating their opinion with supporting reasons. They are so proud of their 5-6 sentence paragraphs, and so am I!