October 15

We have been learning about waste in our world, using drama and literature. We have been practicing and creating presentations to teach the school more about recycling and where our waste goes! Parents please ask your child about the following questions:
  1. What are the 4 R's?
  2. What are some ways that we can reduce the amount of waste we create in our school and home?
  3. How can we reduce the amount of soup spoons we use at school?  These cannot be recycled and go directly to the landfill?
  4. What effect will REUSING and REFUSING have on the amount of waste in our world. 
We are also collecting soup spoons this week to have a baseline of how many plastic spoons are used per week. Our goal is to show this information visually to the school and work towards awareness of ways to reduce this. Thank you for your support in sending in a metal spoon that will come back home on soup days if your child eats soup. 

In science we have been preparing for our Tomatosphere project (growing tomato seeds that have been in outer space). We have gathered information surrounding what we already know about plants and have listed potential problems/ solutions. We have worked through some initial predictions regarding the germination of standard tomato seeds v.s those that have been in space so that we may revisit these predictions after gathering evidence. We have also begun to develop our understanding of key vocabulary that we will need in order to be successful in our research such as "germination", "seed", "sprout", "pollination", and "fruiting". 

We also continue to learn about animal habitats. The 3 most important parts of an animal habitat are: food, water, and shelter. What else is important in an animal habitat? We have many animals who live in our community. How do humans impact their habitats? How can we respect animal habitats?

In Literacy we are working on several types of writing, including emails, friendly letters, formal letters, stories, and weekend news. Students have worked on the "conventions" of writing, and continue to edit for the following components:
  • full sentences with complete ideas
  • spelling using phonetic understanding (sounding out)
  • organizing and ordering ideas
  • punctuation: periods, question marks, commas in a list, and apostrophes
  • descriptive, strong language (replacing "boring" words with "juicy" words - ZOOM instead of run, EXCLAIMED instead of shouting)



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