Friday, April 15, 2011

What’s Going On In our Classroom? Weekly Update from Ms. Goldy 4/11-4/15




(Above: Pysanka egg dying!)






(Above: Poetry cafe!)

(Above: Social Studies Presentations and the park ranger tells us how to recognize frog calls)


Hello Parents!

This has been a fun week in the CotiSweets classroom! First of all, pat your students on the back, for they did a wonderful job with the DC-CAS! It takes a lot of stamina to take any standardized test, but they made it through two weeks of it! Ms. Coti and I recognize and are so proud of all of their hard work and we’re sure that they did us proud.

This week in Social Studies we wrapped up the Famous Colonial Figures presentations, and everyone did a wonderful job! We’re almost finished with this unit, and then we will begin learning about the Revolutionary War.

Thank you so much for celebrating the end of our poetry unit with us! The publishing party was great and we were so happy to see so many families join us.

This week we had a park ranger from our first environmental field trips come and teach us how to recognize different frog calls! The entire fourth grade joined our class in listening to recorded calls and learning how to be great listeners so that we can help this NASA-sponsored program count how many frogs (and what types) live in specific areas of DC.

As I’m sure many of you have heard about, Ms. Coti introduced us to Pysanka egg decorating this week—a Ukranian tradition that is similar to Batiking. The kids LOVED it, and got very creative when making their eggs! Some students also worked on the butterfly mosaic table top that is our class auction project, and it is looking great!


As I just (sadly) announced to your students, my last week student teaching is the week after Spring Break ☹ So unfortunately next week’s blog update will be my last!
Have a wonderful Spring Break and enjoy the pictures—I have A LOT this week!
Ms. Goldy

Friday, April 8, 2011

What’s Going On In our Classroom? Weekly Update from Ms. Goldy 4/4-4/8





(Top: Social Studies presentations and working on our butterfly projects!)
(Bottom: more butterfly oragami, our pizza party, and working on making our poetry books!!)







Hello families!

We survived the first week of the DC-CAS! Pat your child on the back, they all did a fantastic job and Ms. Coti and I are VERY proud of them!! As promised, because there were no pictures last week, this week there are plenty!!

As you may have heard, we have a fairly new system in our classroom in which we help students realize that we are a team and need to be responsible for our actions as a whole group. In order to keep track of how we’re doing, we have a Marvelous Marble jar to which we add marbles each time our class is doing a great job (and from which a scoop can be taken out if we are not doing our personal best as a whole)—and this week we reached the top!! Because of this, our class voted on the prize: a pizza party! What a great way to end a long testing week.

In Social Studies we are presenting our famous Colonial figure projects. Everyone has such a great job and we are learning a lot of interesting facts! Enjoy the pictures!

Our theme for the school-wide auction is B for Butterflies. This week Linn Meyers (Sheppy’s mom) and Sheri Carline (James’ mothers) came to our class to work on the table top that we are mosaic tiling and helped us make origami butterflies. Thanks so much!! Our basket and project are going to be great!

We are wrapping up our poetry unit in writing workshop and as a culmination to the unit, we are compiling our poems into individual books! We will be having a publishing party on Wednesday, April 13th, at 1:20pm—please join us!! On this day we will be showcasing our books and sharing some of our favorite poems—hope to see you there! Please contact me with any questions.

Another announcement: on Tuesday afternoon we will be doing a Pysanka egg dying project. Today a flier was sent home with your student. Please send your child to school with 1-2 eggs on Tuesday, preferably “blown” out. Please contact Ms. Coti with any questions.

That’s it for now—please continue to help your student get a lot of rest and have a good breakfast because testing resumes on MONDAY (today DCPS called and changed testing to Monday and Tuesday rather than Tuesday and Wednesday).

Have a great weekend!

Ms. Goldy