Friendships, Focus and Fun

 A new month means a new character trait and more learning.  This month, our character trait is Friendship.  We will be reading about friends and doing various activities that revolve around friendships.  Our morning meetings will be about how to make and keep friends and the qualities that make a good friendship that will last for years.  This week we will also be celebrating our 100th day of learning and growing.  Also this month we are celebrating Black History Month.  Each day we will learn about an African American and by the end of the month, the children will have chosen one and report about him or her.  We have a lot going on and we are ready to hit the ground running.

Amplify Science:

We started our new unit-Vision and Light and the children are excited.  We will learn how light affects animals and their surroundings.  They will be choosing an animal from the Rain Forest and do research about it, how they live, where they live and their adaptations to survive in their enviornment.  The children seem excited to get it started and are finding some interesting Rain Forest inhabitants to learn more about.  

They seem to enjoy finding facts about their animal and work with each other to make new discoveries.

Wonders:

This week we finished up the story- Delivering Justice.  It was about an African American who saw many injustices he and his family encountered and wanted to make a difference.  The children were engaged in the story and this ties in well with our Black History Month activities.  

Social Studies/ International Night:

We are preparing for our Internatiional Night which is taking place n February 16th.  Each classroom will represent a country that our school body makes up.  We are working on Portugal and finding out many interesting things, places and foods, famous people and their flag.  We will also be putting together a slide show of all our work.  The children are enjoying working together in their groups and creating posters to represent what they are learning.  

Station Rotation:

The children are working nicely in their stations from Tuesday to Friday during the ELA block.  They are completing assignments, helping one another and transitioning to the stations in an orderly fashion.  It has taken us a bit of time to get here but they finally are utilizing each other's help.  

Student of the Month:

On Friday, we celebrated our students of the month for January.  The children are always excited to see who it will be.  Mr. Pacitto also went over the top Lexia winners in each classroom as well as, introducing Friendship as our new trait for the month of February.

There is so much going on in our classroom/school.  Our days are busy, we are always involved in our learning and hands on activities.  Anytime you enter our classroom, we are engaged in lessons and focused on our learning targets.  The conversations are meaningful, the activities are aligned to our  curriculum and the children are excited to learn.