100th Day of School

On the 100th day of school students created a necklace with exactly 100 Cheerios.  Students placed the Cheerios in groups of tens for easy counting.

I hope you are well.  Room K-3 students did a lot of great learning last week, please thank them for their hard work.  Here is the update for the week:

March is Reading Month
This year for March is Reading Month A2STEAM will be doing some school-community-building literacy events. The first is the Read It Forward program, where we will attempt to have all students and staff at A2STEAM read the same book. The book is currently a mystery, but will be revealed on Tuesday, March 1st!

The second big event is the first-ever Used Book Sale, happening on Saturday, March 12 from 2-5pm in conjunction with the Heritage Festival. All items will cost a quarter and all proceeds will go toward building a Little Free Library for A2STEAM! For more information, or if you would like to volunteer, please visit this link. Let's READ!

100th Day Projects
Thank you for helping your students with those 100th Day of School projects, they were great!  I might send those back home this Friday just because we need a lot of space for our next STEAM expo unit.

Box Tops for Education
Thanks for sending in those box tops!

District Wide STEAM Expo
Last week, the snow day that canceled school also postponed the District STEAM Expo.  The new date is this Thursday, March 3rd at Huron High School. The kindergarten team wanted to showcase some of our weather work from our November Expo. I have two Room K-3 students who are going to go to the Expo to help present what we learned about clouds, our anemometer, and some of our other work. Let me know if you would like to participate too, now that the date has changed.  I will be there to you set up.

Curriculum Overview
Science - For our current Project Based Learning unit we are studying the needs of plants and animals and how plants and animals adapt to and change their environment to meet those needs.  Last week we studied the parts of plants (stem, leaves, roots, and flower).  This week we are going look at the specific function of each of the plant parts and start an experiment to show that plants need water and light to survive.

Math - Last week we did a lot of counting by tens, both for the 100th day of school as well as for measuring the height of our peers (see photo below).  This week we will review addition and introduce subtraction and the subtraction symbol.

Literacy - As we begin our next Project Based Learning unit on plants we will be reading about plants and taking a close look at the features of non-fiction books like headings, captions, a table of contents, an index, etc.

Writing - This week students will be writing about what we have learned about plants.

Word Study - Identifying the vowel sounds found in simple words.  We will compare the short o and short e sounds as well as the short o and short u sounds.

Students worked collaboratively to measure each other with blocks.  The blocks are grouped by tens for easy counting.  The student in this picture is about 62 blocks tall.