Happy Valentine's Day! Happy 100 Days of School! Happy Vacation!

We celebrated the day away, packing our highly anticipated 100th day of school celebration and our Valentine's Day celebration into one school day!

We had a Valentine's Day party!  We ate special snacks, did some special math activities, and exchanged valentines.

We made 100 day museums!  Mrs. Lincoln's class toured our museums, and we also got a chance to tour theirs.  We had quite the cornucopia of 100 items!  Everything from bandaids, to baby pictures, to buckeyes, to beads!



And to top it all off, at our February community meeting, our name got picked from the hat to host the March community meeting!

Happy everything, everyone!  May your vacations be filled with things other than just piles of snow!

From Balance to Motion

Our science focus shifted this week from balance to motion.  I'd been getting requests for motion experiments from the students for the last week of so.  Needless to say, they were very excited to get started!  We used straws and disks to make a variety of different top designs.  The goal was to see which design spun 'best'.  Students also got to make colored designs on paper to attach to their tops to see what happens to the colors when the top is spinning.

In math we've started learning about fact families.

Writers' workshop has been a steady stream of persuasive letters!

In readers' workshop, we've been practicing a new book sheet in which the student gets to be his/her own teacher and decide how to respond to the books she/he is reading.  This process encourages students to think about their reading and practice written comprehension.

REMINDER:
The 100th day of school will fall on Friday, February 13, as long as we don't have any more snow days (that might have just jinxed it!).   In our class, we'd like to celebrate the day with a variety of activities that involve the number 100. Please help your child find 100 items from home to bring to school (in a bag is fine-not glued to cardstock).  Children could use 100 Cheerios, 100 buttons, 100 pennies, 100 toothpicks, 100 words, 100 cards, 100 stamps...The possibilities are limited only by the imagination!

When the special day arrives, we'll pass out black paper for our students to use as a base to organize their collections into 10 rows of 10.  Then we'll walk around the room to check out the many wonderful, creative ways to represent 100.  We'll also take a trip to Mrs. Lincoln's class to see their representations of 100!

Please send in your child's collection any time before the 13th.