*Our spring music concert will be on Thursday May 23rd.  Not sure of the time yet, but wanted to give you the date!

We had a great time at the Flynn yesterday!  The show we saw was eight short skits for different picture books, which we had been reading in class over the last couple of weeks.  As we read the books we talked about which ones were our personal favorites, telling why and giving examples from the stories to support our reasons.  Today everyone actually wrote about a favorite and supported their opinions with evidence from the story.  This skill is one that will receive more and more emphasis as children progress through the grades.  Most children picked the trickster tale Borreguita and the Coyote by Verna Aardema as their favorite because it is funny.   Some of the evidence of this included, "it is funny because Borreguita tells the coyote the moon is cheese," and "it is funny because Borreguita knocks out all of the coyote's teeth!"  Other favorites were Owen, by Kevin Henkes, and Imogene's Antlers, by David Small.

During the month of March our calendar has a bird pattern, so we have spent a little bit of time talking about birds, particularly their return for spring!  Today we went a little deeper with our bird conversation and did an exploration of bird beaks.  Children began by working with a partner looking at pictures of two birds with different kinds of beaks.  Based on their observations they guessed what each bird might eat.  Later in the day they had an opportunity to try out different kinds of beaks on different kinds of food.  For beaks they had tweezers, a toothpick, a clothespin, and a spoon.  They experimented with food that represented twigs, worms, seeds, and berries.  Their job was to decide which kind of beak worked best for each kind of food.

A pelican's beak is good for eating fish!

Reports cards were sent home today!  Please look for them in your children's backpacks.

ECO on Wednesday!  Please send your child prepared- it looks like there may be lots of new snow!
(We might just stay at school depending on how the storm plays out, but children should still be prepared to go outside.)

Flynn field trip next Tuesday.  We will be gone all morning.  Unfortunately we exactly the right number of tickets and can't take any chaperones on this trip.

I am looking forward to meeting with all of you at the end of the week for parent conferences.  If you didn't sign up for one yet I still have several slots available on Friday morning.

We have been reading and reading the last couple of months and I am amazed at the progress.  As children are moving from relying mostly on pictures and predictable patterns to actually reading words we have talked about strategies for reading the words accurately.  One strategy we have been practicing is pointing to the words as we read, making sure that what we say matches what is printed.  Another strategy we have worked on is getting our mouth ready with the beginning sound of a word.  For example, if the picture is showing a bunny, but our mouth is ready with the sound for r, we know the word must actually be rabbit.  Finally, we are continuing to work on learning sight words, which can make a huge difference in reading accuracy and fluency.

For several weeks before the vacation we worked on a project in the computer lab with our nature names.  The children all wrote, typed, and illustrated a small report on their nature name animals.  This project is nearly complete and this week we began paper mache projects to accompany to go with the reports.  A little messy, but very fun, and a great way to spend our recess time during Tuesday's rain!

I hope everyone had a wonderful vacation!  The children were certainly excited to write about the many different things they did over the week.  We had a fun ECO morning yesterday.  We began our morning in small groups looking for tracks.  Apparently there is lots of fox activity in the Wu Forest right now!  I have been working on report cards for the second trimester and these will be sent home on Monday, March 18th.  Conferences will take place on the evening of Thursday March 21st, and the morning of Friday March 22nd.  The online scheduler will open up soon so you can pick a convenient time slot.  If neither of these days works for you please let me know and we can arrange a different time.