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.

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!

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.

A reminder of upcoming events -

Monday, May 18th – Early Release @ 1:15 pm

Wednesday, May 20th – Mrs. Comincioli’s Reading group’s State Projects are due

Thursday, May 21st – Celebration of Learning begins @ 6:30 at Lincoln School

Monday, May 25th – No School (Memorial Day)

Wednesday, May 27th – Field Trip to Museum of Science & Industry

Thursday, May 28th – Honor Our Country & Flag Assembly

We all have loose change lying around at home.  Why not pool all that change and put it to good use?   The Lincoln School Family Organization is challenging all classes to see which class can collect the most change.  These funds will be used to help defray the cost of field trips and the after school clubs.

On Monday, May 11th, a Change Challenge Jar was brought to our classroom. On Tuesday, May 12th, the challenge begins. The Change Challenge will end on Thursday, May 21st at Lincoln’s Celebration of the Arts Evening.  Parents, grandparents, and all others will be able to put their change in the classroom jars.

The class in each family that collects the most change will get an extra recess.  Dr. Miller will become a kid for a day in the class that raises the most money.

Finally, if the 2nd Annual Lincoln Change Challenge raises $3,000, the whole school will have a Culver’s Ice Cream Party.

So, bring in that spare change at home and let’s see how much money we can raise!!!

The countdown is on to the last 26 days of school.  It offically started on Friday, May 1st.  Each day we have an activity or snack that correlates to a letter of the alphabet.  If you forget what each day’s activity is, just check our calendar page.  I have listed all of them on there.  The upcoming activities for next week are:

Monday – B for Bubblegum day (teacher will provide gum)

Tuesday – C for Chcolate day (students bring in chocolate for snack)

Wednesday – D for Doughnut day (teacher will provide doughnuts)

Thursday – E for Extra Recess day

Friday – F for Funky Hair day

We haven’t been very good lately about posting our mystery words, but I think we are back on track now! Today’s word is on the “mystery word page”. See if you can figure it out!