Imagination Playground and Salsa!

The Imagination playground was a hit this week!  Our class visited twice and will have one more opportunity to go next week.  The kids had a terrific time working together to create a variety of playground structures to play with.
We had so many terrific examples of working together during share time this week.  Gracie, Sam, Claudia, Ian and Olivia all shared about their experiences working with others and learning to compromise.  We also celebrated Benjamin, Jack and Sam's birthday's this week.  We certainly have a lot of September birthdays in our class!
This week our Red Clover books were I Know Here, Bink and Gollie, and Born Yesterday.  During Writer's Workshop we have been creating accordian books for I Know Here, and writing a Chapter 4 for Bink and Gollie.  Next week we will continue to read more Red Clover books.  In Reader's Workshop we have been talking about what readers do and how to use our reading journals.  We will continue with mini-lessons about what good readers do next week.  This week we learned about blends and digraphs in Fundations.  Next week we will be learning about c, k, ck and rules for using these letters, and closed syllables.
Our math lessons this week focused on growing patterns.  We have been working in groups using structured math talk to discuss patterns, make conjectures about them and extend them.  An example would be looking at a pattern that shows us the first five arrangements and then trying to figure out what the tenth arrangement would be.  The following are links to the Bridges website that you might find useful this year.

http://mathlearningcenter.org/files/media/Parents/UnitIntros/B2Unit1Parents.pdf
http://mathlearningcenter.org/media/Parents/MathWithYour/B2_MathWithYour.pdf
http://mathlearningcenter.org/media/Parents/Vocab/BridgesVocab2.pdf

This afternoon the Firefly team made salsa.  We cut up all kinds of veggies to create a delicious salsa.  Here's the recipe we used courtesy of Stony Loam Farm for those of you who would like to make it at home:
4 large ripe tomatoes, diced
4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
4 peppers or 1 hot pepper seeded and diced
1/2 cup onion, diced
4 tablespoons chopped cilantro/ and or chopped parsley
salt to taste
juice of 1-2 limes or 3-4 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
Combine the tomatoes with their juice, garlic, peppers, onion, cilantro/parsley and 1/2 teaspoon salt in a bowl.  Add the lime juice or apple cider vinegar and taste for salt.  We also added cucumbers, corn and black beans to ours.
Just a reminder that this Wednesday is picture day. We will be having our pictures taken at 10:10 am. 
Have a great weekend!

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