Festive Friday!

Happy Friday! We have had a fabulous and fun week in High Ability!

 Dates to remember:

Jan 8- school resumes

Jan. 11- PTO meeting 2:30

Jan 15th- no school (Teacher workday)

Jan 26- Disney day

Change/Gifted Children/Best Practices
Duneland's high ability program will be changing starting with our current kindergarten students.  Change is not always easy, but if it benefits our students then we know we are moving in the right direction!  More details will soon follow . . . 
 

Christmas Trivia winners for the week were Riley and Tyler!  Thanks for always checking the blog for the challenges!

First grade-Anagrams
We read the book Ann and Nan are anagrams by Mark Shulman. We found all the anagrams in the story together. Some of the words we found were in our other story from last week as well.  We used all the anagrams that we had found to write a goofy story. We talked about wishing on rats instead of a star. I gave them complete control over their stories, only requesting they use 5 sets of anagrams.

 
Second graders- Edward
We were missing  some students from our group so we played a Kahoot game to check our comprehension of the novel.  Kids did a great job remembering the details! We only met once this week due to the all day field trip to South Bend on Tuesday!

Third graders-Jane Goodall
We continued to look at our biographies and use our annotative bookmarks to help us mark things in the text. We had a fun day on Tuesday, playing some word games that made us think super hard!. The kids enjoyed this break in the action, and we will resume our study of Jane Goodall and our annotation marking when we return.

Fourth graders-timeline pictures

The students found pictures to use on their timelines. They have them prepared and ready to add to timelines when we return from break.  After our work was done, we found as many words as we could make out of the words Christmas Tree. The girls liked the challenge and thought it was a fun way to end the week. We will be completing our timelines for our Bio project when we return. We will continue to complete all the work during class time.

Math News

First graders-fun review of shapes
We reviewed our shapes by playing a game of Zani Lingo and what happened? We had fun on Thursday for our "holiday party day" playing with pattern  block shapes and making some holiday creations. We reviewed the names of the shapes and how many sides and vertices each shape has before we made our creations. We used a kahoot quiz to check our knowledge about the shapes we were using in our creations.
 

Second graders-symmetry review
The students enjoyed working on a symmetry review where they had to categorize the shapes that were symmetrical and the ones that were not. They used the miras in our math set to check the shapes before categorizing them.  On our holiday fun day, we played an around the room holiday scoot, where the kids had to read and answer each question that was posted around the room. We also made symmetrical trees...or as I called them symme-trees! The kids had to cut and glue shapes on so that the tree was symmetrical.

Third graders- chapter 1 review
The students completed their chapter 1 review this week. I have not had a chance to check them over yet, but I will get them back to you when we return from break.  Students only had one day of HA this week due to holiday parties being held during our HA time slot.  Cannot wait to regroup after the holidays with this group!

Fourth grade- logic puzzles
This small group of students worked on a logic puzzle called the frozen cabbage band. This puzzle had many steps and not a lot of information to use to solve it. A couple of students struggled, but one came through with flying colors and she is always willing to help her fellow students. Way to go!

The end of the week is here. Time to relax and have some fun with your families. My family will be traveling to Disney this year over break. I hope whatever you do, and wherever you go, you make memories that last a lifetime.

Congratulations to Leah and her family welcoming her little brother into the world early on Thursday morning!

Thank you so much to the families who brought in home baked goodies and such. My family enjoyed them immensely.

I will see you all in 2018!
Happy Holidays!



                                              Mrs. P