Hello! I so enjoyed the chances to meet with all of our families this past week at conferences! I am so glad you could attend, and having your son or daughter there made it even more meaningful for all of us, I do believe. Another event that touched the hearts of all who attended was on Monday night at the Middleton High School Performing Arts Center. Seeing our West Middleton families fill that big, beautiful theater to watch and listen to our students dance and sing always makes me smile from ear to ear with pride to be a part of this school community.
This week back in Room 117, we have been highly distracted by three eggs and the two magnificent bald eagle parents who both patiently take their turn day and night to sit on those eggs to keep them warm. There is a web cam mounted above a massive 6 foot wide nest, 80 feet high, in a tree over a trout stream in Decorah, Iowa, and we are using our Smartboard to see through the lens of that camera. If you want to get your own look (and beware, this IS addicting!), go to www.ustream.tv/decoraheagles . This has been so exciting and fascinating - we get to witness both eagles when they exchange their 'post' over the eggs, when they get up to turn the eggs and to spruce up their nesting material. The camera zooms in to give us a close up view of their sharp eyes and their even sharper beaks (and did you know they have a pink tongue inside that pointy beak?). The website tells us the eggs were laid on February 17, 20, and 24, and the first one is expected to hatch around March 23. You may want to keep a close watch over spring break, and your family will get to witness those fuzzy little eaglets emerge and visibly grow larger with each passing day. What a unique opportunity to witness Nature!
In between glances at our Smartboard screen, we have managed to get some work done! We have begun our new Math Unit 8, which gives us practice figuring out perimeters and areas of rectangles, parallelograms, and triangles. It is a shorter unit this time, and we hope to fit in the unit test before the spring break week. The students are working hard to complete all the assigned pages, which continue to provide practice on fractions and decimals as well. Good stuff! We have begun writing a new story in Language class, in order to practice our logical storytelling and paragraphing skills. The students began with a 'story web' sheet, which contains their ideas and notes jotted down even before the rough draft is written - this seems to make getting started much easier for everyone, and helps with logical sequencing of events. We can't wait to share our ideas and stories with each other! We are also continuing with our class read-aloud, The Birchbark House. We are becoming more familiar with life as it could have been lived by the native Americans in our state before the first European fur traders made their presence known. This is also the subject of Chapter 4 in our Social Studies text, which we will begin next week. Oh, and thanks to Cecilie, we all had a chance to sample a spoonful of wild rice, which many of our classmates had never tried before. We were also able to give ourselves some requested extra time periods for independent, silent reading, which the kids actually cheer for, since many have recently found some really good books they want to get back to. Hooray for that!!
Our students got in some very productive work sessions this week, broke it up with rousing games of Lightning basketball outside in perfect 'summer' weather, took many side trips to see our eagles, and ended with well deserved root beer floats the last hour today, in celebration of my "29th" birthday tomorrow! I was showered with precious handmade cards of good wishes from everyone, and I treasure each one. Thank you, thank you! Enjoy the gorgeous weekend! Melanie Hannam
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