Congratulations!

We had our first Manatee Awards Assembly last Friday. It was so nice to enjoy a wonderful dance performance and celebrate all our hard work during the first months of school.

Congratulations to Miriam for her hard work using her Manatee Manners, Sandra for her hard work in Reading and Writing and Levi for his hard work in Math!

 Jessica recieved a special award for all her hard in Reading during her 1st grade year!  I know 2nd grade will be a GREAT year also!

The World According to Humphrey!

This week we started Ms. Lopez's all-time favorite read aloud book, The World According to Humphrey by Betty Birney. The class LOVES Humphrey and all the adventures he goes on to help his friends. We are already on chapter 8 in the book; we read every chance we get!  Check out the "Learning Links" tab for a link to the website created by Betty Birney, the author.

Wordle Fun!

In class today we made a wordle of what we know about non-fiction. The words that are bigger were said more and the ones that we think are the most important. The kids really enjoyed playing with the colors, font and layout! Our first wordle turned out awesome and really captures what "nonfiction" means!

To make your own wordle at home visit www.wordle.net.

More Air Investigations!

We have been busy in Room 311 continuing to investigate air and learning more about Weather.

First we explored this...

All groups concluded that yes, indeed we could move the air in the balloon if we applied a force to it like squeezing the outside of the balloon or moving the balloon back and forth.

Next up was Balloon Rockets!



First we had to blow up a balloon and secure it with a rubber band.




Then we taped a straw on top of the balloon and put a string through the straw.



We wanted to investigate what would happen when we let the air out of the balloon.

It moved!

Some of our balloon rockets worked better than others, but that gave us a great lesson as scientists. We had to think about changes we would make to our design just like real scientists have to do all the time.

http://tryscience.org/experiments/experiments_probes_athome.html  Here is the link to the experiment if you want to try it at home.

Weather Investigations

We have started our first Research unit on Weather!

To start out our unit we worked in small groups to brainstorm Weather Words. Here are groups working together:

Wow, we already know so many Weather Words!

Our first investigation: BUBBLES! Ms. Lopez made a super batch of bubble mix, the students made their own bubble wand and we headed outside to observe and explore how bubbles are made.

 

 

After some time to explore, we head back inside to write and sketch in Research Notebooks.

 

 

 Look at all the AMAZING observations and learning that happened during our Bubbles investigation!  Smart kiddos!!!

 

 



Our First Weekly News!

We did our first Weekly News together as a class today in writing! Please check it out and read all about our 3rd week of school!

Art Smarts!

Throughout this year our class will have "Art Smarts" lessons that will connect the arts with what we are learning in research, math, writing or literacy. We had our first Art Smarts lesson this week as we learned about Egungun Masquerade Costumes created by the Yoruba people in Nigeria and Benin, Africa.

We learned that these elaborate costumes are created to honor ancestors in a special ceremony. Each picture or pattern on the costume represents important aspects of their family.

You can visit this Egungun Masquerade Costume at the NC Museum of Art in Raleigh! The class hopes to take a field trip there this year to see this piece and explore the other amazing works of art.


We began to work on making our own masquerade costumes. This was a perfect activity for the beginning of the year because it gave us the opportunity to learn more about each other. Each panel of our costume stood for something important to our families.

Here are some pictures of us planning and beginning to create our costumes.

Check back for an update with the completed costumes!