Week 10

Weekly Greetings!

It is almost Halloween, and the students can hardly contain their excitement! On Friday they can wear a costume to school and at 1pm there will be an all school Halloween event for K through 12th grades, similar to the celebration we had last year. Students will be released at 2:15pm as usual. It is also Red Ribbon week, and this year's theme is "Respect Yourself, Be Drug Free".

We had another full week of activity in our classroom starting with a visit from two Tetlin Refuge biologists on Monday to share information on the Lynx study they are involved in. The biologists shared a lynx hide and skull to generate interest, and then explained about the food and habits of the animal.

To help the students better understand the information, they had fun activities to simulate the population cycles if the hare food source is plentiful or scarce.

In one activity, the students were the lynx and marshmallows were the hares. The students had to seek out the food source.

They also learned about how the biologist collar and track the lynx. They had to find the collar hidden in the woods while listening to the beeps coming from an antenna.

Now that we have a new Kindergarten student in the class, we also needed to redo our real graph that shows the number of boys in relationship to the number of girls in our class. We now have 9 boys and 6 girls, so there are 3 more boys than girls in the group.

In Science the students have been learning about composting with worms. On Thursday, we check the compost bags they made five weeks ago to observe the changes. Mr. Groat also shared his composting bin of worms and what his class has been doing with composting organic materials.

Last week in writing with the 1st and 2nd grades, the group brainstormed things they are afraid of when it is Halloween. They agreed that the haunted house at the Community Hall was scary every year, and wrote about why it scared them. I put a large box just outside our room for them to make their own haunted house and they had fun drawing pictures on the inside and outside. 

I have shared a couple of examples in the photos to follow.

The last two weeks, the class has been studying bats and on Friday they made bats decorations using their hands as a pattern. The bats will be part of our class door decoration for a school-wide composition for Halloween.  

Thank you for helping your child with the "Spirit Week" event last week. Congratulations to the 3rd through 5th grade who won the pizza party! Our group tried hard, but the nerd and twin day was difficult for them to dress for...

Have an awesome week!

Kind Regards,

Julie Brown