This week has been fairly short in ELL due to our half day on Wednesday and the upcoming first grade field trip to the zoo on Friday. Here is a look at what we have been working on in our ELL groups so far this week:

Kindergarten: Miss Lundeen is going into the Kindergarten classrooms and working on rhyming activities. Today we looked at my rhyming "brag bag" and guess special items in the bag using rhyming words. Then, we completed a listening activity where we followed directions and colored items on a page that went along with appropriate rhyming words. Our sentence frame that we are working on is "________ rhymes with _________" and filling it in appropriately.

Flex groups for Kindergarten are working on identifying letter sounds and blending them together to form sounds. We are also practicing words that have similar endings and are identifying why certain words don't belong in a word family. EX: Cat and bat come from the -at family. Net and Set cannot belong in the family since they do not end in -et.

First grade: Completed our weather unit and used the cooperative structure "Mix, pair, share" to share our excellent writing with each other. Since first graders are heading to the zoo, today we made predictions of what we might hear, see, smell, or touch at the zoo tomorrow. The ideas that the students came up with were very creative such as "I might hear an elephant stomping his feet". I look forward to hearing if their predictions are correct :).

Second grade: We will be looking at problems to solve and analyzing the sentence structures to determine the correct steps needed to solve a problem. Our group will be working on this throughout next week and will eventually create their own math story problem to present to a different group of students.

Third grade: Last week, the third graders completed a creative writing activity where they wrote their own scary story. Each student had an opportunity to share his or her story around a "campfire" to the rest of the peers. The students completed bones and muscles this week working with Mrs. Howard and did various activities relating to the vocabulary involved within this unit.

Fourth grade: The fourth graders are working with Mrs. Krishnan on identifying vocabulary words related to natural resources, government, economy, history, etc. and were justifying their ideas in a small group.

Fifth grade: Fifth grade students are working on creating colonies in their Language Arts blocks. The students have come up with very creative ideas to create individual colonies with a unique climate, government, and other features.

Please contact us if there are any questions!

Miss Lundeen, Mrs. Howard, Mrs. Krishnan