Saturday, October 1, 2011

September 26-September 30

Hello everyone,

Happy Fall! Here's what's happening in the area of GTD services at Irving School.

Kindergarten
Mr. Packer has been going into the Kindergarten classes and using an activity called "Smart Snips". Smart snips, level 1, requires students to use their imaginations and recall to create everyday pictures with just four shapes (triangle, square, rectangle, skinny rectangle). Some of the creations were a pine tree (2 shapes), a robot with a big nose (2 shapes), a robot with a big nose (4 shapes), and my house is nice (2 shapes and 3 shapes).

1st Grade
Mr. Packer has been visiting the 1st grade classes with his friend "Dot". Dot goes on adventures and asks the kids to think. This time Dot's adventure was the first day of school. Using visual cues and logical thinking, the kids are asked to analyze the situations that Dot is in, or identifying which pictures go with which scenarios.

2nd Grade
Mr. Packer introduced the kids to the planet Zooley a couple of weeks ago. On the planet Zooley, the zoo and all of it's inhabitants are exactly the same as here on Earth, but given names in the Zooley language. Using clues from the questions, students have to answer the questions and identify the animals in the cages using patterns, size, shape, and number to help them. They learned a very helpful vocabulary word "appendages".

3rd Grade
Math-3rd Grade math students are finishing up Unit 1 on geometric terms and shapes and will be taking the test on Monday of next week.

Reading-students are continuing to learn how to complete different types of projects through the use of Rudyard Kipling's short stories from "Just So Stories". We did improv skits based on "How the Camel Got His Hump" and will be creating cartoons based on "The First Letter".

4th Grade
Math-we are beginning to gather data for our project "The Average 4th Grader". We learned to create spreadsheets to organize the data, and we are in talks with Whittier for assistance in gathering as much data as we can.

Reading-students are learning about Japan, Hiroshima, and the atomic bomb in order to build background for the story we began "Sadako and the 1, 000 Paper Cranes"

5th Grade
Math-we are continuing to work on our Data Collection projects and have begun Unit 2 (large numbers, multiplying by powers of 10 (positive and negative), and operations with decimals.

Reading-we are finishing up our "If I Were a Book" books and will begin reading and discussing stories written by Edgar Allen Poe. The first story will be "The Masque of the Red Death".

If you have questions or need more information regarding the GTD Resource services at Irving School please contact me at ppacker@op97.org

All my best,
Mr. Packer