January 27 - 31st

The children are immersed in our study on Germany!  This week Mrs. Thomann came in for two additional German language lessons.  She is an amazing teacher, by the way!

The children played "I Spy" using the German words for the colors:

 The children learned the days of the week in German and words for describing the weather.  Using the two, they became weather reporters!

Reviewing numbers:

German animal names:

This week we paired up with our 3rd grade buddies from Mr. Kelly's class who read the Grimm's Brothers fairy tales to their parners, as part of our study on Germany.

This week Anna's mom, Cosima, came in to teach the children how to make the traditional German dish, Schnitzel! It was a huge hit with all the children.  Thank you so much, Cosima!!

This week we learned a new game called "Pin the Number on the Number Grid", which follows the idea of "Pin the Tail on the Donkey".  Children are blindfolded and given a number on a sticky note.  They then have to estimate where they think the correct placement is, based on what they know about the patterns on the number grid.  

 

This week the children got to try out our new rock climbing wall in the Gym!

Pattern block creations!

The temperature was finally high enough to have some outdoor recess again this week!

January 21 - 23rd

Another short yet productive week!

We were very lucky this week to have Stefanie Thomann (Tristan's mom) come in to give us a German language lesson!  The children learned how to greet someone, tell their name, and where they are from. They also worked on learning their numbers.  Mrs. Thomann will return next week to teach the children more.  Thank you so much!!

 German greeting:

German counting:

German nursery rhyme:

The students worked in groups to order the numbers from smallest to largest:

This week we wrote our first letters to our new penpals at Ann Arbor Open!  

The children are very excited.

 This week in math we focused on 3-D shapes and continued our geometry work with 

line segments and points.

 We are bidding a very bittersweet farewell to our dear Alice, as she and her family will be moving back home to Korea on Monday.  We were sad to miss school on Friday as we had a special goodbye celebration planned for Alice.  She plans to stop by school on Monday to say goodbye to the class.  We will miss you very much, Alice!

Happy New Year!

This week we continued our study of rocks by creating casts and molds of sea shells.

In Math we have been exploring attribute blocks, categorizing blocks by color, shape, thickness and size.

We have also been working on line segments, including parallel lines.

The students are continuing their practice with the partial sums strategy, this week using base ten blocks as a visual:

This week we celebrated the life and teachings of Martin Luther King Jr.  Each year  all the classes at Angell hear the same read aloud in preparation for our all school assembly (which will be held this coming Tuesday).  This year we read "I Have a Dream".  We also heard some stories from past years this week:

 

Tristan also shared his Junior Ranger badge from the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site!

This week Amelia celebrated her birthday by showing us a dinosaur robot she built at home!

Amelia's dad came in on Friday to teach us about his job at  Ford!  We learned a lot about the many safety tests that are performed on cars, as well as new features that make cars safer.  

Thank you, Mr. Wu!

This week Tristan celebrated his half birthday by showing some magic tricks!

Illustration by Conrad of our new bird feeder. We have been visited by many winter birds including chickadees, nuthatches, and mourning doves!

Snowy winter fun!