Week of October 17-21

The Monkeys had a great time last week finishing up our learning about heat, light and sound energy in science.  We used light energy from flashlights to make shadows inside of little tents on our tables made out of manila folders.  We put the flashlights close to the objects in the little tents and moved the flashlights farther away.  We also made tambourines and listened to their sound energy.  We learned that the vibrations from shaking the beans made sound.  The students had an AWESOME time going on an "energy" walk and looked for 3 types of light energy, 3 types of sound energy and 3 types of heat energy.  They observed things such as the sun, cars driving by, the air conditioning units, an airplane, birds, etc.  We will begin to learn about magnets this week in science.

In language arts, we have continued to introduce sight words and we learned "go" and "my" this past week.  The students worked on poetry with these two words.  We also really focused on characters and the reasons for their actions.  Ask your child about the Kevin Henkes books we read, Chrysanthemum, Owen and Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse.  We talked about the characters in those books and the reasons for the characters' actions.

We discussed our culture in Social Studies and made our own little book that was sent home.  We will continue to learn about different cultures in our community that are from around the world.  We will be listening to nonfiction books this week about food, music, homes, celebrations and more in different cultures.

The Monkeys had a great time learning about Clay this past week since he was our superstar!

We are excited to learn about our next superstar this week, Sophia W.!