A Month Already!

The children enjoyed our field trip to see Filipino Folktales and Fables at Hawaii Theater for Youth.  It was exciting for them to be an audience member in a live production with music, song, and dance. Some students had prior knowledge of some of the cultural stories and for some it was a totally new and exciting experience!  It was great to see students so engaged and showing an appreciation for the arts. 

In Langauge Arts...

• We continue to use highlighting strategies to find text evidence in the stories we read from Wonders.  Using this strategy, students are learning to be critical thinkers as they read closely when asking and answering questions.  Check out these photos:​

• During grammar lessons, students are practicing to capitalize and end their sentences with the proper punctuation.  They are also identifying whether a sentence is a statement, a question, or a command.  They learned how to find root words and can identify inflectional endings such as ed, ing, s, & es.  

In math...

• Using our Stepping Stones curriculum, students learned about the counting-on strategy. Students learned it's much more efficient when you start at the larger number and count on the smaller number.  Using this strategy is faster and leaves less room for error. Students applied this counting-on strategy when solving word problems.  They had to write matching equations with the unknown in the correct position to various math stories.  For example, the following problem would have the following matching equation:
  • ​​​There were 12 lollipops in a bag.  Mom bought some more.  Now there are 16 lollipops altogether.  How many did Mom buy?   12 + ? = 16​
• ​Students also learned about the commutative property.  They learned that with turn-around facts such as 5 + 7 and 7 + 5 you can switch the two parts and it wont effect the total.  ​

In Social Studies...

• We kicked off our "Stranger Danger" Project-Based-Learning Unit.  A letter was sent home that details the unit more specifically.  So far students have watched some age-appropriate short news clips of children in their community who almost became victims of "stranger danger" but acted in a safe way and prevented themselves from getting harmed.  Not intended to scare the children, but rather these lessons and videos will be used to bring to light the realities of the situation.  Ultimately we all want our children to make smart choices and behave safely in risky situation. ​​

• We also began our Culture and Family History Study.  Students are enjoying as they learn about why many groups of people came to America.  After reading a wonderful story called We Came to America by Faith Ringgold, students identified that the author's message was- while we all look very different on the outside, have different cultures, race and religions, we are more alike than we think.  We all want to be loved, happy, and accepted for our differences.  WOW!  What a powerful message!​  This is a photo of our Common Themes in Literature or Author's Message Tree Map Bulletin Board.  As we read great stories, we will continue to add to it!

REMINDERS AND ANNOUCEMENTS

• Field trip forms and money are due 9/7 
• Family trees and questionnaires are due 9/10.  If you already completed them, thank you so much!!!  But I did not collect them because I want the children to make sure then can read and understand most of the information before turning it in.  They will be having discussion groups after the due date.  I'll start collecting them next week.  Thank you! ​