One Day in December

This week the students took a hand at writing the blog.  We wanted to tell you a little bit about how our day goes.  Each student chose a photo for which to write a caption.  We then revised and edited each caption as a class.  Please ask your child which caption he/she helped write.  Enjoy reading!

There are bells on the door for Christmas in December.  Each bell on the door has a name of  a classmate.  Mary and Joseph and Baby Jesus are in the stable.

Here is a picture of Jesus and Mary.  They are near a shining star. Jesus is a special hero.

The windows are nicely decorated.  We colored them ourselves.  They are very colorful. 

Here are the trees that we made.  They shine in the dark at night.  We wrote what we do for Christmas. 

The Christmas trees on the lockers are made by us.  We put sparkles and glitter glue on them.   We wish we could do the Christmas trees all day.  We like doing that, we had fun. 

In the morning we get unpacked and then we do what is posted.  Morning work is fun.  When we are done we read a book or study math facts with a buddy.  

Morning work is kind of hard but we still do it.  After morning work we sometimes get to play on ipads.

Math War is fun.  It is a game where two people play.  They put down two cards and add them together.  Whoever gets the biggest sum wins.  There are a couple of groups.  We did Math War today.  

For calendar, first we say, "Today is Tuesday, December 16th, 2014."  Then we say how many days we have been in school.  The number is 69 days.  Then we ask a question. 

Math is cool.  It makes you smart.  Our class is doing math.  My friend likes doing math.  We were doing two digit subtraction.

We are doing math.  It is hard what we are doing in math but it is fun. 

Once a month we read with our reading buddies.  But this time we made a bookmark for our fifth grade reading buddies.  We do fun things together.

Today we were with our reading buddies.  We did a paper about matching  Christmas songs to pictures.

We did really well and we worked really hard.  It was fun. Our fifth grade buddies are nice and good at helping us.  

We like our reading buddies, they help us read.  They are nice to us. 

Today our class had to talk about traditions.  We had to bring something in and talk about the things we do every year.  So this is the class with their traditions.
We all wish you a Merry Christmas!

 I hope you enjoyed our writings.  The students enjoyed writing them!
Below are two photos Mrs. Knuutila took during the Christmas concert.  One of our classmates did a wonderful job playing "All I Want For Christmas is My Two Front Teeth". 

One of our students was excited to have his mom bring in his puppy to show the class this week.  Buckley is such a calm, lovable dog; the students enjoyed petting him.

This week we "traveled" to Mexico, Germany, England, and Spain.  We learned a little about the customs in each country.  Here we are making "crackers", which are popular in England.  Please ask your child about the "souvenirs" your child brought home from their travels.

This is what our tree looked like the morning of our party. 

We started out the day by opening up our presents- just like Christmas morning :-)

Mrs. Parfinski loved the fleece throw the students made for her.  The kids and I will all miss her.  What a wonderful gift she has been for our class.

Our Christmas party centered around Jesus's birthday.  This student is showing some of the party decorations.  We enjoyed several activities today.  We had a lesson in fractions by frosting graham crackers by 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, and finally a whole.  We also practiced different parts of speech by playing Christmas Mad Libs and enjoyed a Christmas movie and popcorn.

Thank you so much for all of the Christmas gifts.  You were very generous to Mrs. Parfinski and me.  I appreciate all of your kind words and support throughout the year.
Merry Christmas to everyone and God bless!
See you next year!

Holiday Happenings!

We have been super busy these last few weeks.  Unfortunately, I am unable to download the photos from my camera but I will try to rectify that problem over Christmas break.  We have been keeping the real reason for Christmas in the forefront by celebrating Advent together and reading/writing about Christmas. 

This week we wrote about what we would give Jesus for his birthday.  Like the Thanksgiving writing that came home, I did not correct the children's writing- it comes straight from their hearts.  The children shared their thoughts with the class and I was very moved by what the children wrote. Please have your child read it to you when it comes home this week.  Our Christmas party on Thursday will be a birthday party for Jesus.  A Room Mother will be contacting people to bring a drink or birthday napkins and cups.

This week has been like Santa's Workshop.  The children are busy doing secret little projects and having a lot of fun doing them.  I have heard more than once, "It's time to go home already?"  

We have been working so hard in Math!  With a lot of practice, everyone is doing so well with double digit subtraction.  I love seeing the pride on the face of a student who just couldn't understand it at first but is now working through the problems with few mistakes.  When working at home remind your child of this alliteration, "If the bottom's bigger, you better borrow!"  Thank you for working on this at home- it makes a big difference in how quickly the concepts are learned.


One of the fun units we do at this time of year is our Christmas Around the World unit.  Both classes join for lessons on different Christmas traditions in other countries.  We have already "visited" Australia and Iceland.  Next week we travel to Mexico, Germany, England, and Spain.  In each country we learn their traditions, locate the country on a map, color the flag, and make a little craft.  I apologize, I failed to have the students bring home their items from this week.  We store them in a ziploc bag and the students' assignment notebooks state they should bring back the bag.  I will send them home on Monday and the bag can be returned on Tuesday. 


We have enjoyed reading books from our Author of the Month, Jan Brett.  This week they fit right in with our reading concept; getting information from illustrations.  Her illustrations are so detailed and interesting, she tells a whole story just in the borders of the pages. 
    You may have noticed a blank page on the weekly reading tests.  Many of the grammar concepts we teach are higher level concepts and are still being taught in 5th grade (like plural possessives).  Dr. Fike agreed that while it is important to model and practice these concepts, assessment can be accomplished by observation and daily practice rather than a formal test. The common core standards place much more emphasis on reading and comprehension skills instead of grammar and we thought our tests should reflect that. Yay!

 As you know, we attended the Nutcracker Ballet this week.  I want you to know that the students were so well behaved.  I was very proud of them.  The students were well prepared for the performance.  Both Mrs. Rahill (our librarian) and I read and discussed the story prior to the event so the students would understand what was going on.  Most of the time the classes sat in rapt attention, taking in the beautiful scenery and dances. Thank you to our wonderful chaperones!

Important Dates:
Dec. 15th - "Sandwich" book reports due
Dec. 17th - Winter concert at 9:40 AM (Students can wear holiday hats and headbands)
Dec. 18th- Class Christmas Party (students are invited to bring in a G rated Christmas movie to show- we will vote on one)
Molinaro pizza lunch in cafeteria with a minimum $3 donation
Dec. 19th- Christmas Mass  at 9AM, then early dismissal.  If you are coming to the mass and would like to take your child home, please send in a note in the morning.
Enjoy your weekend!

Happy Thanksgiving!

    I hope everyone enjoyed Thanksgiving with family and friends.  Before we know it Christmas will be upon us!  We were so thrilled to have the mother of one of our students come in to talk to us about her heritage.  We have been learning about the Pilgrims and Native Americans so it was wonderful that she came in to tell us stories, show us a dance, introduce us to aspects of her heritage.

Here Mrs. N ( I don't use names in my blog) shows us a Native American doll and tells us a story about why the doll does not have a face.

This is an example of a bowl made by Native Americans from the West.

More Native American items.

Mrs. N showed us how to do a Smoke Dance and some of us even tried it.

We made Friendship Snacks for people who use the Outreach Center.

We packaged them and added a note wishing our friends a Happy Thanksgiving.

We enjoyed our own feast together of leftover Friendship Snack, corn muffins and butter that we made ourselves in the classroom.

What a busy week we had and December promises to be just as busy.  We will continue to celebrate Advent together and remember the meaning of Christmas.  
If you check the reading study guides for the next unit you will notice that we only have two reading tests in December.  We spend more time on SS in December because we learn about Christmas traditions around the world.  We are looking forward to getting together with Miss Agostini's class to learn about 6 different countries and their Christmas traditions. 

Past and Present

   This is my favorite time of the year.  I love to hear stories about Pilgrim life and talk about our traditions.  My daughter was supposed to come in to give a demonstration on turning raw fiber into usable yarn for creating clothing; similar to what they did in Colonial times.  Unfortunately she was snowed in. Fortunately she had already given me all of her materials so I was able to show the students. 

We start with raw fiber.  This is wool but we also got to feel and see flax and cotton.

The students got to try their hand at carding the wool.  This makes it nice and fluffy with the fiber all going in the same direction.

We took the roving and used a drop spindle to form it into yarn.  This was much harder than it looks  and the students were surprised to learn that Colonial children often had this job to do in the home.

The finished yarn can be woven or knitted to make something usable for wearing.  I think the students got the idea that making clothing was a much longer process back then than it is today.

We sent a nice thank you note to Mr. Mattar for giving us a pizza party, coloring books, and crayons.

Our Fun Friday centers included an addition/subtraction game, "Pop".

We also used ipads to improve our math and language arts skills.

At the Listening Center we read Frog and Toad All Year from our author of the month, Arnold Lobel.

We also decorated Christmas cards to send to a veterans' hospital.  The students wrote words like, "Thank you for serving our country" and "You are a hero". 

Here is the photo that is going on our published book, Traditions.  I am sending the book to the publishers this weekend- we are so excited!
The students will be happy to know that there are no vocabulary or spelling words to study this week.  Since it is a short week we will not have a reading test.  We will fill our days with performing the plays, getting ready for Advent, making corn muffins and butter, learning more about Colonial Times and Native Americans, subtracting double digits, etc.  I don't think we will miss the reading series!

 Other lessons:
Reading: We used baseball stories to learn about how to draw conclusions.  We also practiced our fluency with our Thanksgiving plays.  We are putting these plays on for other students.  Parents will be invited to our big, end of the year plays.
Math: We are getting really good at adding columns of double digit numbers.  Next week we will start subtracting with regrouping.  We also worked on writing numbers in expanded form. Ex: 45= 40+5
SS: We received more emails from our fictional Pilgrim and Native American friends.  We also viewed some clips about the Mayflower and Plymouth Colony. http://www.plimoth.org/learn/just-kids/thanksgiving-virtual-field-trip
Religion: We talked about sharing the gifts God has given us and Pentacost
Important Dates: 11/25- Native American Dance presentation with Mrs. Nash
11/26- Mass 9:40-10:30