March

 March was a busy month! It was wonderful to meet with everyone at parent/teacher conferences and celebrate all the great work students have done this year. 

For social emotional learning, we have continued our weekly Second Step lessons. The last several weeks have included Ways to Calm Down. Children are learning to stop themselves, name their feeling, take a belly breath, and then come back to the problem. This has been really helpful in the last few weeks as there seems to be a little more problem solving happening among friends.  

Ms. S (school counselor) has also started her unit on personal safety. Kids have enjoyed learning the Never, Never rules, the Three R's, and more. 

In literacy we have been working away on tapping out to read and spell CVC words. We have also been growing our list of kindergarten "sight" words, and putting it all together to read what we call "decodable texts". We have been doing lots of writing in connection with our science units (Force and Motion, and now Plant Growth) and it's so amazing to watch students writing complete sentences mostly independently!

In science we did some fun Force and Motion experiments, specifically around pushes and pulls. Students had a chance to do some inquiry work, asking questions and testing out their ideas, then reflecting in their journals with what they noticed. We recently shifted gears and are doing more inquiry around plant growth, testing how much water and light plants need to grow. 

In math we have been so lucky to have Kathy Schaw, math interventionist, in class with us! We have been coteaching and had some great weekly routines including counting collections (growing larger each week, learning to group 5s and 10s in an organized way), continuing our work on teen numbers, and starting some problem solving! Problem solving at this age is much more around learning to draw a picture and write an equation that matches the problem, than solving to find the answer. Learning these routines and habits will help them as the problems get harder!

Outside, we have been able to spend a little more time in the forest and children are loving the warmer weather! We had some warm weather sledding, and built a teepee with Chapin earlier in the month! Students also painted some butterflies and flowers to decorate the classroom for Spring (their idea). :)