Mrs. G.'s Chalk Talk: May 5, 2017

Dear Families,

Thank you to our DCC and students for a wonderful Teacher Appreciation Week! We really appreciate the beautiful flowers that were sent in and all of the wonderful goodies we received all we

Also, thanks again for all of the donations to our Baskets for the raffle for Family Fun Night. We're looking forward to hearing who the lucky winners are!

Next week, we begin our NWEA testing. We will start with reading on Tuesday, first thing in the morning. Please make sure that your child gets lots of sleep the night before and eats a healthy breakfast. Also, we usually let them chew mint gum or suck on mint Lifesavers. Please send in any small candy or gum that you feel comfortable with them having during the test. See the links below for information about this!

Gum chewing before test taking...

Peppermint's effect on test taking...

Some important dates coming up:

*May 5th: Family Fun Night

*May 9th: NWEA test for Reading
*May 10th: Visit from a Beekeeper!

*May 16th: NWEA test for Math

* June 6th: Field Trip -Please refer to permission slip and note sent home earlier in the week!

Reading, Writing and Science!

We continued to work on our nonfiction books as it takes a long time to write a great book! You will be so impressed when you see them and you'll learn so much! Some students began their work on our pamphlets and our webpage. Next week, we'll finish up our pamphlets and our website so that we can teach our community about bees!

This week we also learned about Author’s Purpose, the reason why an author writes something. We can remember the different purposes by thinking of PIE’ED: to persuade, to inform, to entertain, to explain, or to describe.

This is our Plant Lab! Thanks to the NEF for funding years ago!

We finished up planting all of our seeds and did two labs this week. Our first science/seed lab was observing the inside of the seed. Our special vocabulary was seed coat, cotyledon, and embryo. Our second lab was planting lima beans in baggies so that we can watch them grow. Hopefully on Monday we'll see some amazing roots. We hung them on our window and are looking forward to seeing what happens next. Our seedlings are starting to sprout and our Greenhouses are all set up!

Researching bees!

Thank you to Dr. D. and Grandma JoJo for helping us to learn from experts about bee allergies and planting! Dr. D. explained to us all about bee allergies and what a Dr. would do if a patient had a bee allergy. She showed us about the shot with an tester Epi pen. Grandma Jo Jo helped us to learn about planting a pollinator garden. We learned about the types of flowers to plant and other things that we could do to help save the bees. She also brought some pumpkin plant seedlings that we're really excited to plant! She suggested to plant them outside anytime and that they'll need lots of sunshine and room to grow!

We have eight chicken eggs in our incubator! Hatching date around May 23rd!

Math:

This week we completed lessons 8.1-8.5. We had fun learning about geometry, polygons, quadrilaterals, lines, angles and shapes. We'll keep you posted on when our next test will be. Here are the IXL skills for unit 8. Some favorite videos that we watched were: