Mrs. Comincioli's Classroom Corner

Parent/student/teacher conferences are Nov. 11th & 12th. The students have been creating power point presentations and can’t wait to share them with everyone! They’ve been writing about the following –

*Reading and math goals for this year
*Three things they are proud of
*What they’ve been studying in theme, math and language arts
*Independent Reading Goal
*Spelling Record
*Mad Minute Goals
*Homework Record
*Quality Student Rating
*Three things they would like to accomplish in Intermediate

The students worked really hard on these presentations and I was impressed with their technology skills! Keep up the good work!!

October Book-It Reading logs were due today! If you haven’t turned yours in signed, please send it in tomorrow.

November Book-it reading logs came home today. Students should be reading everynight to reach their goals. November calendars are due December 1st.

Our Halloween Party was a success! We had some yummy treats, created robots made out of candy, raced with “eyeballs”, and turned each other into mummies. This year was the first time we had to have our Halloween parade in doors due to the rain. Even though the parade was not what we hoped for, everyone was dressed up in fantastic costumes! What was your costume this year?

I can’t believe we’ve been in school for over a month now. The time is going by so fast and we’ve been really busy! I apologize for not keeping our blog updated. We need to catch you up on all the fantastic things we’ve been doing in our classroom.

MI Day
We started out the year with MI Day. We spent a whole day learning about the different multiple intelligences and finding out which ones we are good at. The day was based around plants and animals and we had a blast traveling from station to station! We also took an online quiz in tech class and created a graph of our strengths and weaknesses with the multiple intelligences.

Lincoln Park Zoo
The intermediate classes took a field trip to the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. Before our trip, we worked with our groups to create a map of what we wanted to see while we were there. That day we visited the animals we were interested in and took notes on each one. We will use this information when we write our animal research project later this year. We saw many fascinating animals, including the snow leopard, the lions, polar bear, and the penguins.

Camp Duncan
The 5th grade students had an overnight outdoor educational field trip to Camp Duncan in early October. They spent Thursday and Friday learning doing team building activities, tye-dying t-shirts, and learning about the outdoor wilderness. They really enjoyed the camp fire and staying in cabins! The 4th graders worked with other 4th grade students in the building those two days. They practiced their geography skills by creating maps of “lost” islands. They also watched a fascinating movie about energy called “City of Ember”. It’s based on a really interesting chapter book you might enjoy!

Themes
This year we started off the year studying economics. We learned about supply and demand, goods and services, producers and consumers. We will be applying what we’ve learned throughout the year as we do some fund-raising for our school. We are now studying light, color, and electricity. So far, we’ve learned about reflection, refraction, opaque, transparent, and translucent. We’ve done some amazing experiments in the science lab. We learned how fiber optics work and we created concave and convex lenses.

Goals
We also took our beginning of the year MAPs test for Reading, Math, and Language. We are using that information to write our goals for this year. We’ve been working hard on our power points for triad conferences which are coming up Nov. 11th and 12th. We can’t wait to show you what we’ve accomplished!

So far our year is off to a great start! We are going to make it a priority to update our blog as much as possible, so please be sure to check back each week! We hope to hear lots of positive comments from everyone and find new and interesting blogs to follow this year!

Welcome back to school! Tomorrow, Tuesday, Sept. 8th is a two hour day. We will be sorting and labeling supplies, so be sure to bring those with you. We will also be doing a “get to know you” activity! Looking forward to a great year!

Summer break is officially here! On our last hour of school, we celebrated with doughnuts and juice. We also gave out our class awards and said farewell to our 5th graders who will be going on to the middle school next year. Hopefully they won’t forget to come back and visit often!! We will miss them a lot!!

We will be on summer break until the beginning of September. Please don’t forget to read and practice your math skills over the summer. You don’t want to forget everything you’ve learned this year! Check back for updates throughout the summer! Hope everyone has a fantastic summer! Please be sure to post comments with interesting things you do and see over the summer.

Each year students create a variety of artwork for Lincoln’s Celebration of Learning and Art. Click on the Smilebox and you can see a variety of work our students created for this year’s show. I am very proud of the time and effort they put in to create this amazing art!

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Last Thursday was Lincoln School’s Celebration of Learning and the Arts. Students shared their portfolios of work with their parents and performed an amazing concert. The school was filled with art work created throughout the year by every student in the building. There were several artists to visit, including Latvian folk dancing, origami, muralist, and drum ensemble. Here are a few pieces of art work displayed by students from our class.

More art work to be posted at a later date.

Reminder: Tomorrow is our field trip!

A few reminders for our field trip -

• Bring a sack lunch.
• Bring your backpack to carry your lunch and a book to read on the bus.
• It might rain, so bring a jacket.
• No electronics (phones, ipods, video games ,etc.)
• Remember to use appropriate and respectful museum behavior during our visit.
• Be safe and have fun!
• Chaperones – please be at school by 8:05 am for a quick meeting!

As a part of our living things unit, we created a hanging garden in our classroom.  We divided the class into 6 groups.  Each group “planted” 9 different lima beans.  Each lima bean was planted in a plastic bag with paper towels and hung on our bulletin board.  The variables for each plant were different.

• Plant A – Don’t water the lima  bean
• Plant B – Water the bean with a vinegar-and-water mixture
• Plant C – Cover the bag with construction paper
• Plant D – Do not put wet paper towels in the bag
• Plant E – Coat the seed with petroleum jelly
• Plant F – Cut the seed in half and plant both halves in the bag
• Plant G – Rotate the bag one turn each day
• Plant H – Add one cup soil to the  bag instead of paper towels
• Plant I – Water the bean with a mixture of liquid fertilizer and water

We wrote our hypothesis for each plant and will be observing them for the next 7-10 days to see which ones grow and if our hypothesis are correct.