Typing Fun at Home!

Dear Parents,
Our Digital Learning Specialist, Samantha Kosakowski, has recommended a wonderful new site where students can practice their typing skills at home.  It is free to register, and they will have access to the Dance Mat Typing program that we use at school as well.  This is a wonderful way for students to get more practice with the home row.  Encourage your child to hold their fingers in the correct position at all times, and you'll be surprised at how quickly they increase their skills!

https://www.typedojo.com/

Jumping Jacks for All!

We had such a great time in science today!  Students worked in small groups to find out how many jumping jacks they could complete in one minute.  All students had an opportunity to use a stopwatch, which we will be using for many of our science investigations this year.  In their groups, each student had an important job.  They took turns jumping, using the stopwatch, and counting jumping jacks for their friends.  Students recorded their data in a table, and tomorrow we will be developing a bar graph to display our data.  As I think you can see from the videos below, everyone had a wonderful time -- and got lots of exercise in the process!

Learning to Work as a Group!

This week in Room 8, we have been engaging in many different small group activities.  At this age, it is important for children to learn to work with others.  They need to know how to adjust to new personalities, to problem-solve, to compromise, and to collaborate.  It's never too early to work on these important life skills!

During these activities, children are practicing how to handle classroom materials, how to use quiet voices when working together, how to rotate through stations, and how to monitor their level of focus.  The pictures posted below are of the students playing a place value game for math as well as various language arts center activities.

 Jack and Jonathan

 Evy and Kieran

 Katherine, Kuin, and John

 Jordyn and Beckett

 Ella and Tara

 Working with rhyming words

 Getting some practice with antonyms

 Making new words

Creating compound words

Dylan and Phoebe