Team Persistence researched animals and their habitats through Skype sessions with the Wildlife Center of Virginia, Jennifer Nolan (author of Sea Turtles Up Close), and Wyoming State Museum. After learning about animals on PebbleGo, students created dioramas and green screen videos to share their new learning. Students then helped save sea turtles by helping create reusable bags from old t-shirts. Our class has already raised over $100 to send to The Turtle Hospital. We will be offering additional t-shirt bags for a $2 donation at the May 23rd Home and School Connection Night! We walked to Greenfield Park for a Wehr Nature Center field trip learning about Snow Tracks! We looked for animal tracks in the mud, learned about where animals stay warm in Wisconsin winters and were nature detectives. Our 5th grade band students are preparing for the All City Band Festival on April 24th at West Allis Central. We have a rehearsal on that morning with all of the district band students to prepare for the 7:00 p.m. concert. Students should report by 6:20 p.m. Please consider joining us for this exciting concert! Student Council has been very busy this school year. We have organized spirit weeks, helped Team Persistence with a food drive, worked with Team Diversity when they were collecting P.j.s, and many other events. Our latest event was Pennies for Patients for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. In a little over a week Walker Students collected over $2,000! Thank you Walker Students and families. Excellence East surely has worked hard during the month of March. We have entered the Achieve3000 contest and are proud to announce that ALL of our students have read 8 or more Achieve articles scoring about the 75%. Many of the students have read into the teens and twenties. This has all been done in one month. We also have been working hard at getting ready for the Forward Exam. We know the students will do a great job. It sounds like all we have been doing in work, however we have had some fun times, too. On Fridays students may eat in the classroom and every day after lunch we enjoy a read aloud and some quiet time before "hitting the books" Enrichment Committee received a grant this year to be a part of the My Plate Demonstration. In February we welcomed Chef Julie to our school to share with us the importance of eating fruits and vegetables. At the assembly she demonstrated how to make two very yummy salads. Students then enjoyed samples of each of the salads and took home the recipes. In March Mr. David Stokes visited our school (thanks to Mrs. Barber). His assembly was a fun hands on informational presentation about animals. Team Respect has been exploring force and motion with push and pull activities. Students worked in groups to create ramps for hot wheel cars. They predicted, designed, and tested which ramps would make the car move faster. Team Integrity has been immersed in Earth science these past weeks. Each child has applied their learning on day, night, or the water cycle in some form of media. The first graders made videos to show their learning and the 2nd and 3rd graders on Team Integrity worked on showing their knowledge through creating brainpop videos or keynote presentations. Please click on our seesaw link to check out our projects! Please add feedback! To sum up our Water Cycle unit and March we created "Lenny Leprechaun Terrariums." We made leprechauns, planted grass seeds, and we watched as the water cycle started to happen. We taped the top cup to the bottom cup after watering the seed to see if the water cycle will start. When we see water droplets on the top cup, that is the water cycle in action! This week we saw little roots shooting down, and then green grass sprouting up! They then observed and reported on how their leprechauns were doing! Happy March everyone! Excellence West students recently completed an Inquiry unit on Westward Expansion. To demonstrate their new learning, students were assigned a letter from the alphabet. After identifying an important word that not only begins with the letter they were assigned but also deals with Westward Expansion, students created digital presentations. We then displayed our thinking on alphabet tiles with QR codes for other students to access our digital work. Please use the following links to access some of our student work: https://www.powtoon.com/online-presentation/d7rjfbnXdSJ/?mode=presentation https://www.thinglink.com/scene/1165688154317914113 https://edu.glogster.com/glog/emily/329xcouxqra https://flowvella.com/s/5puo?s=iprs This month, Diversity has been hard at work learning about landforms and discovering what they look like. We have some great artists in Team Diversity and are so proud of their diverse artistic abilities! Diversity has been hard at work using new apps such as Keynote, and Book Creator to show our learning in new and exciting ways. Lunch Bunch: Over the past couple weeks four new lunch bunch groups have begun! Friends meet together with Ms. Brownell and Ms. Brandi during lunch time and are working on a range of friendship skills, growth mindset, and calm down skills through fun themed games and crafts. This groups theme is ocean friends! Currently friends are learning what it looks like and sounds like when we are showing good friendship qualities. SEL:
Our 4th and 5th grade classes are completing our Careers and Individual Planning Conference Unit. Students are exploring skills and strategies that help prepare for middle school, as well as exploring interests and learning styles that connect well with future careers. After spring break students will continue creating the individual learner profiles and we will be working with Google Expeditions where students will explore "A Day in the Life" of careers they are interested through augmented reality! Our 4K-3rd grade groups have been working on our Safety Unit during SEL lessons. Students have learned "Never Never Rules", Three Ways to Stay Safe: Recognize, Refuse, Report, The "Always Ask First" Rule, and the difference between safe, unsafe, and unwanted touches. Our school district uses the Second Step curriculum. For more information and family resources that can be utilized at home please visit https://www.secondstep.org/ and login with the Activation Key: CPU1 FAMI LYG1 (for Team Respect families) or Activation Key: CPU3 FAMI LYG3 (for Team Integrity and Team Diversity families) *(Team Persistence is using an older version of Second Step that does not have an online dashboard) |