Sorting seeds

Students estimated the amount of seeds in their cups, sorted them into types and then counted them.  
Today's take aways:  

• Beans are seeds
• There are lots of different types of seeds
• Seeds come in lots of different shapes and sizes
• We eat seeds every day
• Team work is a lot of fun!

Read-a-thon assembly

Last Friday we completed our Read-a-thon with a building wide reading.  Every person in the gym, had a book in hand and shared this in our community love for reading.  Westwoods read 2000 minutes last week as a school.  How may minutes will your child read over the summer?  Set a goal, then break it down into small daily goals.  Can your child read 1,100 minutes before September 1st?  If they read 20 minutes a day, 5 days a week that is 100 minutes a week.  There are roughly 12 weeks of summer, with room for non reading days and other events, your child could easily meet this goal.  Find a calendar and have fun tracking their reading minutes.  

Mathematicians make a graph with data

Today the students sorted data and created a representation to demonstrate their understanding of the data.  Students shared their thinking with their peers and made statements for their peers about their representation. The peer's job was to look at the data and decide if the statement was true or false.  Everyone is working on speaking in complete sentences and adding detail about/being specific with their statements:  i.e.  There were more happy people than sad people vs more sad than happy.  

Reading with Flashlights

Go Noodle

Looking for some great movement breaks for the summer?  Check out Go Noodle.  If you haven't signed up yet, you should.  There are hours of kid friendly fun movement!  Here is a favorite video from Go Noodle.  

Read-a-thon

Students are loving the read-a-thon.  During our 30 minute session with the reading torch, we book shopped, we read our chapter book, practiced our phonics reader with shared reading and did some partner reading.

In morning meeting, we greeted our friends and shared the writing on our shirts.  They loved reading the messages and giggling about what they said.  Later in the week we will tie in writing and write a book review from a book we read during the read-a-thon.     

Learning about Money

Students explored coins today, practiced the names of the coins, the values and some students even played a BINGO game where they practiced reading the words, numeric value and recognizing the penny, nickel, dime and quarter. 

Interlochen Friends make a visit to our classroom

Our new friends from Interlochen School joined us for morning meeting, a scavenger hunt, surveys about our interests, reading, lunch and recess.  The students in our class were so welcoming.  They offered help when needed, invited new friends to join their activities and shared about themselves.  I am so proud of these amazing individuals and the effort they put forth to help our new friends feel welcome in our school community.  A huge thank you to the parents who joined us at the grill out and helped our new friends with their lunches and feel welcome with their kind conversation!