With our second week underway, the Blue Bay classroom is getting busy! The students completed a difficult teambuilding exercise on Wednesday called Traffic Jam, a challenging task that required repeated attempts, communication, and leadership skills. We have started our exploration of ancient civilizations with prehistoric humans, and are looking forward to actually being in a cave this Friday on our field trip to the Lava River Caves. Math class is bustling as we continue to review core skills; and we have begun dividing up into 4th/5th grade and 6th/7th grade groups for Geometry. 

Our first spelling test is on Thursday. You can continue to help your kiddos by asking them if they have math homework, reminding them to study their weekly spelling words, and quizzing them on their multiplication flash cards (should be in their homework folder/backpack). We have not gotten into full swing with the planners yet but expect those to come into play next week. Everyone has been working hard. I have been impressed with the enthusiasm and curiosity of these students so far this year.

We are finding our rhythms as a sweet group of Rose Hips. I sent an email home to everyone checking in how the first week has been. It has been wonderful here at school! Please let me know if anything is coming up at home that you have questions about. 🙂

In math we are playing with sorting, counting, and writing tidy numbers. In literacy students are getting to know their vowels and short vowel sounds. We are also doing a lot of sound games with rhyming, isolating starting sounds, and final sounds.

Each week I will give you a few ideas or games to practice at home. See below for this week’s ideas.

⇒ Games and activities to try at home
Work on coming up with your own rhymes! It can be anything you see around you and students can come up with nonsense works- for example: desk, lesk, mesk or real word rhymes, dog, bog, log. Try to make it tricker with multi -syllable rhymes: bubble, double, trouble.

We are thinking about why is school important and what I can do to get the most out of school. We read a book called “The Invisible Boy” about a kid who feels invisible at school. Ask your students what they can do to make sure no one at BBS feels invisible. 

Green Ridge Math: Students are getting exposure to a new warm-up routine, telling time, place value w/ three-digit numbers, calendar awareness, temperature data, and flexing math and literacy muscles on math crosswords!

Green Ridge Literacy: Students are practicing new routines around decoding, spelling, vocab, and writing in their writer’s notebooks. Green Ridgers are also currently reading a Guatemalan tale titled “The Emerald Lizard.”

Art Literacy: Both Rose Hip and Green Ridge classes created flags using various lines and shapes with chalk pastels. They are currently working on color blending, paper cutting, and gluing activity involving frogs or toads.

After a busy first week we are now settling into our school routines in week 2 at BBS. The students have shown great effort so far and are eager to learn and play. We introduced our buddy system this week where older students act as mentors and helpers for the younger students. Most of the kids seemed very excited about this system. I spent some time this week going over bus safety topics and we practiced a bus evacuation. We will practice our fire drills and other emergency drills soon. 

In Field Study class we introduced our first unit this week: Geology. We will spend our first several weeks learning about and exploring the local geology of the Metolius basin including the hydrology of the fresh water springs. We will visit several springs this month and study the water. We will also be learning about volcanoes and how the Cascade mountains are formed.

In P.E. we have been learning our routines and doing some simple throwing and catching games. We plan to introduce some of the fall sports in the coming couple months including football, soccer, cross country running, and volleyball.