Cheering for so many Successes!

Here we are at the UVM game. Wahoo! We had a fantastic time cheering on the Catamount Women's Basketball Team on Wednesday.


Our measurement unit brought us to the hallway!  We are measuring with inches, feet, and yards!



Our crafternoon making 3D rainbows was so much fun!  We measured consecutive size rainbow strips onto our cloud background.  Math, art & cooperation makes for wonderful learning time.  







Valentine's Day was overflowing with love and kindness!  Thank you to all of our families for supporting our pancake breakfast.  Thank you for sending in the amazing, thoughtful, fun valentines as well.  We have such an amazing group of students to celebrate every day.  

Our geography unit will close with a state parade!  We have painted our state floats and we are researching about our states.  We will complete our float creation during the three days we return from vacation.  Our parade will be on Monday, March 11th at 10:15. You are welcome to join us.  We will also video it and upload the link.  

Have a great vacation.  See you back at school on Wednesday, March 6th.

Learning, Growing and Celebrating Together!

We completed the month of January with our nonfiction publishing party!  We celebrated each nonfiction writer in Mrs. Belisle and Mrs. Hock's classroom by reading each writing piece and sharing positive feedback about their writing on our Publishing Party Positives sheet.  Each student chose a lollipop flavor based on a skill they felt brought "flavor" to their nonfiction writing.  

Our new writing unit is opinion writing.  We are writing about our favorite books and authors to kick off this unit.  Our learning is about creating sentences of opinion, providing evidence to support our opinions and using illustrations to help guide our understanding.  This week we wrote letters to future readers of these books as well as authors and illustrators to excite, share gratitude and opinions about the books!  

As mathematicians, we started our unit on measurement.  We have measured with a teacher foot and transferred that nonstandard unit of measure to the knowledge that one foot = 12 inches.  We measured with yards, learning that 3 feet = 1 yard.  We made inchworm rulers!  We are measuring items both large and small, estimating and measuring to compare.  

We are singing The Fifty Nifty United States as we learn about the geography of the United States of America.  This week we used political maps and labeled one with state abbreviations, physical maps to identify landforms and levels, and a map of national parks supported by google earth to share some of the beauty in these places. We are looking for donations of photocopy boxes, with the lid, for a final state project. We will need one box for each student.  Thank you!

We celebrated the 100th day of learning together.  We took new photos in our 100.  We counted 100 items, we skip counted by 100's.  We added to our memory books to share how smart we are.

Flat Stanley's continue to arrive!  We are learning so much about the United States from your kind contacts, their enthusiastic responses, and letters.  Each time a new Flat Stanley arrives we display them on the map in the hallway.  We look forward to each letter we continue to receive.  

Thank you for all of your donations and time as we celebrate Valentine's Day this coming Thursday.  We will decorate Valentine bags in advance so the students can share their valentine's with each other.  

Thank you for all you do,

Jen Belisle

 Reading is a favorite part of our school day.  I'm so proud of our readers! Our book boxes have nonfiction and fiction books.  

 

Each day we practice mindfulness techniques after lunch.  On Thursdays, we practice recognizing, utilizing and being responsive to our breath.  This activity, called star breathing is a recent skill.

 

  

Thank you to Mrs. Knoth and Mrs. Almassahlki for teaching us about animals in winter, insulation, and survival.  We experienced a fun science experiment recording temperatures of hot water (140 degrees), creating an insulator and placing the insulated water in the snow, then recording the temperatures at the end of the lesson.  Our students connected our math work of comparing problems, finding the difference and using a variety of strategies to do so in this lesson!  

 


  Thank you for sending in the puzzles of the United States!  It's great to work with many classmates putting them together and making observations about the different types of maps, features of maps and reading maps carefully.  

Thank you for bringing in the Flat Stanley activity that was sent to your house.  We look forward to getting some of the Flat Stanley's back from our letters sent to our contacts across the United States in the coming weeks.  Our map is set up in the hallway for us to label with states and place our Flat Stanley's we receive.  

Some things to ask your child about:

Reading notebooks

Spaghetti squash and garlic from Miss Meg in Farm to School

Preparing a nonfiction writing piece to publish

Olympics inside when it was too cold to ski

Coding in the library with Mrs. Springer

Word Study

**I invite you to send in the January kindness calendar to share this week.  We will positively share moments of kindness we've done throughout the month.  We are hopeful to share how kindness can spread and the joy it brings. There is no pressure for the calendar to be complete or filled in.  We will discuss our acts of kindness regardless.  

Thank you for all you do,

Jen Belisle

A Wonderful Week of Learning!

Peer Editing

This week we chose one of our chapter books, question/answer books or our procedural (how-to) book to peer edit.  Each writer read their classmates writing and offered written feedback of two stars and a wish...two skills they used well and one improvement they could make to their writing.  I'm humbled and impressed by the kind, caring, thoughtful and intelligent way these partnerships worked together.  

We learned about Martin Luther King Jr., Alfred Nobel, and Nobel Peace Prizes, Rosa Parks, Henry Dunant with the Student Justice Union from SBHS and some of our fifth-grade peers.

On Friday, we met Sam Drazin the creator of a Changing Perspectives curriculum that inspired us to appreciate ourselves and each other for all of the visible and invisible differences.  Sam was born with facial differences and in these photos, he is sharing a hearing aid device to help us understand how he hears.  

This week we finished our Flat Stanley letters.  Thank you for sharing a contact with us.  We will finalize and mail the letters out tomorrow, Tuesday, January 22nd. I hope you all enjoyed receiving mail at your house.  We invite you to decorate the Stanley that arrived at your house and bring in to school to share this week.

We are beginning our studies of the United States of America.  This week we have experienced state maps and we are familiarizing ourselves with the state names and abbreviations.

On Friday, I read a book titled, Martin's Big Words during our morning meeting.  When we took the time to discuss our thoughts about the book, our brilliant students made connections between Martin's vision of acceptance with Sam Drazin's changing perspectives:  If we change our perspective and love people for who they are, with differences that are visible and invisible we can live in peace.  

Thank you for all you do,

Jen Belisle

We are non-fiction writers!

Kindness Counts!

The foundational guiding principal in our room is the golden rule.  We do unto others as we would have done unto us.  The golden rule provides the opportunity to practice this valuable skill daily.  I hope you are also enjoying the kindness calendar that went home as a focus for this month.  Our students also signed up for a collection share day.  This calendar went home this week as well.  

Our math focus is on subtraction.  We are working with and without the number line as a tool to help us subtract.  We are problem-solving, subtracting over decades and centuries as well as subtracting with single and multi-digit numbers.  This week we introduced an online tool called Dreambox.  We will use this interactive, individualized tool during our math and menu time.  As soon as I'm aware, I will let you know about at home use of this tool.

Word study groups are back in our routine.  We meet daily for 20 minutes to practice our word study skill and then reflect and quiz on Friday.

Our winter creative arts schedule started this week!  Our class was out cross country skiing on Tuesday, before the snow day!  Hopefully, it will be warm enough by Tuesday of this week that they can go out and cross country ski with our recent snowfall.  

We are writers!  Our class loves to write and they have a lot to feel proud about.  Our focus this week was on "how to" or procedural nonfiction writing.  During this unit, our students have learned to write non-fiction chapter, question/answer & procedural books.  During this upcoming week, we will focus on completing drafts, editing and revising.  

Our readers have reader's notebooks!  We are now recording book titles, authors and dates of the books we are reading.  We are also looking forward to writing about our reading in a variety of ways that will enhance our ability to think about and understand what we read.  

Flat Stanley!  Our current read aloud is Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown.  This character will help us begin our study of maps and the United States.  This weekend your child brought home a note about the possibility of sending a copy of Flat Stanley to a friend or relative that lives in another state.  Please return this note this week so we can coordinate our mailing.  

The following is an overview from Mrs. Wheeler and Ms. Bedell about our unit called Changing Perspectives:

Our school has chosen the theme of “Changing Perspectives” to help our students gain a better understanding of differences and disabilities. We are collaborating with Sam Drazin, Executive Director of Changing Perspectives { www.cpne.org} and former teacher. He will be presenting to all our students in grade level meetings on Friday 1/18. Each week, Mrs. Wheeler and her intern Ms. Bedell will be incorporating their curriculum into their weekly class time with us. They will read a book with our class and discuss the importance of the uniqueness and value of each member of our school community. While we will be learning about various disabilities, our focus will be on recognizing each person’s strengths. To celebrate our learning, we will be organizing a disability awareness hands-on workshop. We will set up stations to simulate various disabilities and invite students to experience daily activities without being able to see, walk, hear, or use their fingers. In first and second grades, each student will create a booklet to demonstrate their learning.

Thank you for all you do,
Jen Belisle

Happy New Year!

Students entered our room with smiles and joy on Wednesday!  Our students are kind, wonderful people and it felt great to welcome the new year with their positive energy and thoughtfulness.  

Ms. Bryce, our student teacher from St. Michael's College has joined our classroom community.  She will teach with us every day until April vacation.  Ms. Bryce loves to teach and we are grateful for her journey with us.  

We will celebrate kindness in the month of January.  A Kindness Calendar will go home on Monday with a description of ideas and options to record attached. 

We experienced many cooperative tasks this week.  We made snowmen from a six-foot piece of construction paper.  We worked together learning coins and multi-digit subtraction strategies while reading the book Alexander Who Used to Be Rich Last Sunday by Judith Viorst and we started writing question-answer books with new topics!

 


During Mrs. Wheeler's guidance time we held our first class meeting.  We discussed what makes our classroom a great place to learn and what each of us can do to continue to make that happen.  I'm proud of each member of our learning community, each person spoke their truth, were kind and willing to speak.  I shared with our students, and I'll say it again, I'm proud to be their teacher.  

Next week begins our winter schedule for creative arts.  Our hour-long cross country ski day for PE will be on Tuesdays.  Please make sure your child has all their outdoor gear for this experience. 


Thank you for all you do,
Jen Belisle