January - A New Year

Kindergarten students drew a very cute snowman using the Kid Pix program and printed it to take home. Some classes visited a wonderful website filled with activities called Poisson Rouge (Red Fish) at http://www.poissonrouge.com/. We finished the month in our Big Thinkers Kindergarten program comparing sizes of objects. There are several levels of difficulty, so that adjustments can be made for each child.

1st grade classes began the month with practice on the food pyramid. Classes have learned about the food pyramid in Dec., so we do a Kid Pix lesson in which the students choose foods that are in particular food groups. 1st grade classes are learning to tell time to the half hour. In our Kid Pix program, students draw in the clock hands and stamp the numbers on a digital clock on a template of 4 clocks. Next, is practice with the sounds ch, sh, wh, and th. Students typed the letters at the top of the page and drew lines to separate. Then, "stickers" pictures of things that begin with those letters are placed in the correct section of the page. Two classes used our Big Thinkers 1st Grade program to choose if a particular sound of a word is heard at the first, middle, or last part of the word. It's presented in a game show format, and puzzle pieces are revealed as each correct answer is given. The other two classes will do this in Feb.

2nd grade classes have continued to work on their Wampanoag Power Point slide. After finishing their facts, students learned to change the font, the font size, and font color. Then, they worked on recording their voices into the slide. I'll be checking all the slides and putting all slides together into a Power Point slide show for each class. I'll email it to the teacher, who can then email it to you. 2nd grade students studied the seven continents in Dec. and January in their classroom. During the last week in January, students who were finished recording into their slides, were able to visit a website with an age appropriate power point about the Continents, then play the Continents game by dragging the names of the Continents onto the corresponding Continent.

3rd grade classes began our i-safe Internet safety curriculum this month. We discuss netiquette, computer security, personal safety, and introduce intellectual property. This is a process that takes several weeks to finish. We began this month with netiquette. Students learned about good manners on the Internet. We began learning about Cyber Security. Students learned that they should ask an adult before opening emails, especially attachments. Sometimes attachments contain viruses. They learned about the importance of anti-virus software, and played a game on http://www.netsmartzkids.org/indexFL.htm.

4th grade classes began working on spreadsheet. We took a survey and count of pets owned by the class members, added the data to the spreadsheet, added a header, formatted or changed the spreadsheet as needed (adding rows, changing column width, etc) and did a formula to add a column. Students created a pie chart and placed it below their data. Next, they began a conclusion of their own from the pie chart. This is a MEAP skill - to draw a conclusion from a chart or graph. Students merged and centered cells,typed a conclusion,then prepared to print. Some students printed in January, but most will print in February.