April 18-21

HAPPY EARTH DAY!

Happy Earth Day!
April 22nd was Earth Day, so we spent some time this week discussing the importance of taking care of our planet and what we can do to help. We watched a BrainPop, Jr. video about the 3 R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. We also read our recent Scholastic News issue called "Follow That Bottle." We enjoyed the book Earth Day  - Hooray! and wrote about what our hands can do to help save the Earth. Finally, we used all that we've been learning during our recent math unit to create a graph about our favorite ways to help the Earth.

Thanks to everyone who returned their Love the Earth Report Card!

During Writers' Workshops we continue to work on our realistic fiction stories about our characters. We studied the first books in the Iris & Walter, Pinky & Rex, Henry & Mudge to learn about what the authors include in book 1 of a series. We then applied this learning to our own series.

In Readers' Workshop, we're supporting our own series books by paying close attention to the characters in books. We also found out that when we pay close attention to the relationships that the main character has with other characters in the book, we learn even more about the main character.

During Math Workshop, we continued our graphing unit, learning about different types of graphs and creating and answering questions about them. Next week we'll begin our Geometry, Measurement and Equal Shares unit with an introduction to time right at the start.

During Science this week, we created terrariums!

Each of our scientists created a map key and map of their group's terrarium. 

One group decided to put their wheat seeds along the side of their terrarium. They dug a trench just as some of them had seen grown-ups do in home gardens.

In addition to the seeds, we also planted our ivy stem cuttings in our terrariums. 

During science we also read an Earth Day poem together then drew a picture of us doing something to help save the Earth.

This week we practiced a tornado drill, and our friends did a terrific job of being safe and responsible!

 

Earth Day was obviously a big focus this week. We had fun creating Earth Day crowns and hand print Earths which we used for a project where we wrote about what our helping hands can do to help the Earth. 

Next Friday is our Growing Power field trip - we're so excited! Thanks to those who were able to volunteer to chaperone. We only have 1 chaperone for our trip to the zoo on May 8th, and we would LOVE more so that we can enjoy the day in small groups. Thanks for your consideration!

Enjoy the rest of your Sunday!

Michelle 

Mark Your Calendars!

Wednesday, April 26: Early Release Day

Friday, April 28th: Field Trip to Growing Power 9-11:45am

Monday, May 8th: Field Trip to the Milwaukee County Zoo 9am-2pm

Wednesday, May 10: Early Release Day

Thursday, May 11th: Guest author Lester Laminack 

joins us at Stormonth!

Wednesday, May 24: Early release Day

Monday, May 29: NO SCHOOL

June 1: BMS Musical "Into the Woods"

Tuesday, June 6th: SAVE THE DATE!!! 

Annual Family Picnic! 11:30-12:40

Thursday, June 8: Last day of First Grade! 

See you later, Second Grader!