Adventurers Team
Adventurers Team
Team teachers Pam Wise/Joplin James
Welcome to Adventurers’ Parentlink message for Friday, March 29th.
This coming Tuesday, April 2nd we will be taking a field trip to the Shelburne museum to see the tour based on the picture book the Ox-Cart Man. This field trip will wrap up our winter theme on early Vermonters and colonial times. The presentation does not end until 11:30 so it will have to be a full day for the Kindergarteners. Kindergarten families please return the letter that was sent home on Friday by Monday so we will know where your child should go after school that day.
This week in preparation for the “Ox-Cart Man” program, many creative homemade items arrived this week to bring to the marketplace. Each day students shared some of their crafts, some were functional others decorative, and there were games and toys. We then had a barter in which students were able to trade for another item.
This week in math the second graders worked on measurement. We measured our best long jump and found the median length jump of the class. We also discussed various units of measurement for weight and made estimates of weight for everything from a sheet of paper to a jumbo jet. You might continue this discussion of weight with your child at home. The Kindergartners practiced using ordinal numbers and had fun skip counting by two and threes. Megan has been working with the first graders in math. The first grade has continues to work on their Kid Pix slideshows and they’re turning out great! Our goal is to finish up so we are able to present them to parents during the Math Night next Friday. The first graders have also been working with addition and subtraction fact families and fact triangles.
Our poem this week was called The Wind. Many of the students were able to recite the poem on Friday either as a solo, duet or trio. You can ask your child to recite the poem for you.
Katie filled our Estimating jar this week with rubber bands. There were many different sizes, so it was a challenge to make a good estimate, but Clarke came the closest with an estimate of 800, so he will bring it back on Monday filled with something new and interesting. The total number of rubber bands was 841.
This Monday is April Fools Day!!! We have requested that in the spirit of the day everyone will dress in a silly, crazy fashion. Some of the ideas we brainstormed were, wearing clothes backwards and inside out, wearing clothes that do not match, wearing two different shoes, creating crazy hair-dos and wearing lots of layers. We also discussed that, when choosing their outfit they should not pick anything that is going to distract them throughout the day (i.e., a ski mask over the face or silly sunglasses). We went over some “appropriate” tricks that the students might be able to pull on a member of the family and believe me, they were very creative!!!
This week we started a new unit on geography. So far we have explored the seven continents and discovered countries within each continent that we may want to know more about. On Friday Megan taught the class a game called Geography Pairs. You can ask your child to tell you more about it. The homework for next week will be to find out where your ancestors are from, what country and what continent the country is located in. Also, if you happen to have anything from that country (a book, craft, article of clothing, or coin for example) please bring that in and tell the class a bit about it.
Remember that next Friday evening April 5th, 6:00-7:30, is the Adventurers spring Family Math Night. Jos Vandal has agreed to coordinate the activities and would like to meet next week to make arrangements. We need about 10 volunteers to help run the activities. Please contact Jos by phone or e-mail at: joss@basinharbor.com or langua.vt@verizon.net (802-475-4622 Ext.841 or 985-0766) Also, we could use a couple more people to volunteers to bring refreshments and clean up that evening. Please send us a note, if you can help out with this.
On Monday, April 8, I (Megan)
will begin my “solo weeks”. I
have chosen the theme of Ecology and have planned lots of exciting activities
that will inform the students about the environment.
I have planned time for a visitor named “Recycle Michael” from
Chittenden Solid Waste to come in and lend his expertise in the area of
recycling and composting to the class. He and I will also be facilitating an activity where the
children will create inventions, art and instruments using only scrap materials.
Also during my solo weeks, we will take a trip to the Flynn to see a
performance called Tremendous Journey. This
performance lends itself to the theme of Ecology extremely well because it is
about the habitats of forest animals. I
will go into more detail about the performance and connections I will make in
the classroom closer to the date we will be going.
Because my solo weeks are based on an interdisciplinary unit I would like
to integrate the theme of Ecology as much as possible throughout each day.
If our parent volunteers who have reading groups would like use the theme
during that time I have gathered a large collection of books about nature and
the environment that would work well for a discussion, or a project.
If you have any questions please feel free to contact me.
The April SCS newsletter is now available on line at http://shelburne.k12.vt.us/scsforms/newsltr/news0402.PDF
Please
continue to send in those half-gallon cardboard juice or milk containers.
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maintained by Joplin James & Pam Wise
jjames@shelburne.k12.vt.us
Last updated: March 29, 2002