Shovels and paintbrushes in hand, we descended upon the Olson home like a swarm of worker bees. We were ready to take on the task! We weeded, shoveled, painted, planted, and watered all within an hour. The end result was amazing! I really realized just how wonderful a job we had done when I returned to the home later to water the flowers. A neighbor even stopped by and complimented the group on a job well done. Most importantly, we have taken this task off of the hands of a grieving family. They have expressed so much gratitude for our help. Thank you for all of your donations, green thumbs, and hard working hands. This was a very emotional and special project and I am so glad we helped this Park Family. A special surprise announcement...ADDIE IS COMING BACK! We are so proud of Addie and all of her hard work at Feeding School. She is graduating early and returning to the classroom for the last week of school! GO ADDIE!
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Planting:
We will be participating in our Planting Hope project this Friday. Thank you so much to all who have donated, loaned items, and signed up to help. If you are planning to help out, please meet us at school at 12:45. I will let Mrs.Lidgard know to expect parents so that she can send you my way. We will plan to work from 1:00 - 2:30 at the latest. If we need to shorten our time or get through our work quickly, we will head back early. Math: We will be doing our final 5 minute test this week. This test will tell me where students have landed after practicing their facts for the year. Please remember that it is so important for all multiplication and division facts to be memorized by the time students enter 4th grade. Practice a few times a week to be sure that they stick! Wax Museum: Our Wax Museum date has been set for Friday, June 3rd at 1:00 and we are working our tails off to get ready! The "Wax Museum" is our unique way of celebrating all of our hard work in writing this year. We have been working hard on researching and writing our sections to our informational pieces. Students will be dressing up like their character (please remember that these costumes can be homemade! No need to spend money!), and sharing bits and pieces from their person's life during the wax museum. If you have any questions about this, please email me and I can clarify. Luau: On Thursday, June 9th, we will be having our 3rd grade Luau celebration. A party food donation sheet will be coming home shortly! If you wish to donate, please fill this out and return. This is a really fun event and the perfect way to end the year! We are really in the final stretch of the year now! The kids are doing so well with flexible seating that I wish we started it long ago. This little switch has really transformed our room. I have seen an increase in responsibility and excitement in all of the kids. They have really all worked hard to keep the room neat and take care of our seating options.
I am still in need of volunteers for our May 27th service project "Planting Hope." I will send another note home this week. Please let me know if you would like to join us from 1:00 - 2:30 on that day as we plant, paint, and clean up the yard of a family in need. Our book club takes place on Monday, May 16th from 6-7pm. If you have read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and would like to join us, please do! I am looking forward to this celebration of reading! Our Wax Museum is in the process of being planned. We are currently in the research process of our writing. I hope to have a date selected in the next week and a half. In the meantime, brainstorm costume ideas with your child. Costumes do NOT need to be bought. Please feel free to get creative with what you have. Brown paper grocery bags can transform into many different things! Reminders: May 16th - Book Club @6 -7 May 27th - "Planting Hope" Service project Final Service ProjectOur final service project has been set! Last week, a purple packet came home detailing our final project for the year. This is a project that is near and dear to many heart at Park Elementary as many students knew the Olson girls well. After loosing their stepsister just two years ago, they suffered the unimaginable loss of their mom to the same cancer. Now, the family is preparing to sell their home and we are going to work to take the yard work off of their hands. On May 27th at 1:00 we will be walking down to the Olson home to do some yard clean up, planting, and even some fence painting to prepare the home for listing. I am looking for donations of flowers, borrowed garden tools, and helpful hands. Please send back the purple sheet or email me if you are able to help in any way! Book ClubOur book club for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory will be taking place on May 16th from 6-7pm. Please be sure to email me if you plan to attend! This event is packed with fun that relates back to the book (and sometimes the movie too!). Field Trip RecapOur field trip was so much fun! It was great to see kids exploring the museum and finding interest in different things. Thank you so much for chaperoning and taking that time to be with our class. We really had a blast!
M-STEP ReviewWe are done with the M-STEP and boy does it feel GOOD! I was so proud of how hard the kids worked on this challenging test. There was nothing easy about it, but they sure didn't give up. They took on the challenge like champs and were so careful to work through all of their problems on scrap paper before inputting their answers. They truly worked their hardest and I am so proud of them! If your child missed a test or is still working on a portion of a test, they will be working on completing this on Monday. Field Trip Wednesday!Our field trip to the Grand Rapids Public Museum is this week! We are super excited because we have added in the planetarium this year. If you are chaperoning, a letter will be coming home with more details on our schedule for the day as well as a scavenger hunt to use in the museum. Please bring this along with you when you meet us on Wednesday. A few reminders: * All students must ride the bus to and from the museum. * Please NO additional siblings on this trip. * Pack sack lunches that can be completely thrown away. We will not have access to a bus or a place to store lunch bags or containers. * If you are chaperoning, please no gift shop. The kids will be informed of this as well to help with the asking! * Chaperones will meet us at the museum at 9:20. Our bus will depart from Park at 9:00am. * We will be leaving the museum at 1:30 to return to school. If you wish to pick your child up early, please meet us back at Park and sign your child out. If you have any other questions that I have not covered, please email me! Water Filter ExperimentLast week the students wrapped up their recycling unit with a water filter experiment. They worked together to design a filter that would take out dirt, oil, and other pollutants from the water. Choices to build their filter included: cotton balls, gauze, sand, crushed charcoal, pebbles, paper towel, and scraps of coffee filter. It was interesting to see how many students avoided the "dirtier" items like sand, charcoal, and pebbles. In the end we took a look at which filter was the most successful and determined what could have been done to build a better filter. Check out some of our pictures! Reminders:Wednesday - Field Trip to museum
Monday, May 16th - Book Club @ 6pm - 7pm Keep studying those math facts! Our mad minutes will resume this week! It is official, we are now a flexible seating classroom! It was so exciting to rearrange furniture and purge many extra chairs and tables to create this new space for learning. Students seemed equally as refreshed and ready to learn in our new environment!
In our flexible seating classroom, students are responsible for finding a spot that will help them to learn and produce their best work. This may mean laying on a yoga mat, sitting on a beanbag, using a traditional table, sitting on the floor at a lower table...it doesn't matter, as long as we are learning! The students know that in accepting this responsibility, they also are agreeing to follow all of our rules that go along with it. This includes the rule that, "Mrs.Gitler may move anyone and anytime, no questions asked." They were great with this rule and have been showing responsibility in their choices so as to avoid being moved at all! We have also taken on more of a community feel with this switch in our classroom. We now are only using community materials and are accepting responsibility for each and every item within the classroom. This means, picking up a pencil if it is seen on the floor, returning markers to their sorted color spot, being sure not to pick apart our pink erasers, and more. Though we have just begun, they really are doing great with this new idea! One final change that comes along with our new seating is an additional meeting spot. We have now added "the pitcher's mound" to our vocabulary. This spot is located in the center of the room and allows students to see the screen and board. We will use this area often when we are working on new math concepts or doing any sort of note taking. We will still use our dugout to come together for reading lessons, writing lessons, and to meet as a community. Thank you again for all of your donations to make this possible! I can't wait to start our week with this new set up and allow the students to explore further the way that they learn and work best! |
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