Halloween Festivities and Fish Eggs
/The last two weeks have flown by! On Halloween we had our annual costume parade. Students were delighted to parade around Berglund Hall to the cheers of family, friends, and other spectators.
Unfortunately, the week following Halloween, several viruses and other illnesses hit our community. We tried our best to continue working on our Anansi and the Moss Covered Rock when possible, but it was difficult with many students and teachers absent. Actors who were at school have been practicing their lines while the set designers worked on scenes and props. Our ticket designers created colorful tickets for our performances. This week we are thrilled to have everyone back and we are getting to have practices with the entire cast. We are currently coordinating with the other classes to determine when we can perform our play in front of the school.
At the beginning of November a volunteer from Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife delivered over 200 salmon eggs to our classroom as part of the Fish Egg to Fry program. This month we will be learning about the salmon life cycle and their great migration journey. We will also be immersed in a unit on nonfiction writing as students research, write, and edit books about salmon.
Our reading groups continue to meet one or more times each week to receive small group instruction. We have been learning many new spelling patterns and often use highlighters to highlight those spelling patterns in the text we are reading. In math our first graders are working on fluency with math facts up to 20 and our second graders are wrapping up a unit on measurement. This week in math students are completing “milestone tasks” to demonstrate what they’ve learned throughout these units. These milestone tasks are used as assessment tools to guided our teaching and let us know which students need extra support before moving onto the next unit.
Outside we’ve been savoring the beautiful fall days. Inside we’ve been working on a variety of fall art including a drawing tutorial of a fall scene and a painting project called Starry Night in Autumn.
Lastly, here are photos taken by students of a variety of their structures. Students engineers have the opportunity to save their structures throughout the week. They often return to these structures each day to solve structural challenges or increase the complexity of the structure. On Friday we take photos of the structures and then dissemble them so that we are ready for fresh building inspirations each Monday.
