March 25-March 29th,
Hi Eagle Families, We are in the last week of March this week and the last week before Spring Break! We have a lot of fun planned this week. On Monday, we are celebrating our last student birthday and will be reading the book, Click, Clack, Surprise! by Doreen Cronin to celebrate. We will also be running our coffee cart along with the Osborne High School transition students. On Tuesday, we will be going with 5th grade on a field trip to the MLK Jr. historical center, which we are all super excited about. Wednesday will be awards day, please come celebrate your student and see them receive their award at 1:15pm in the cafeteria! Thursday we will be going to Osborne High School to have our Adapted PE field day where will have lots of fun celebrating all the hard work the students have been doing in PE this year! This week also starts the Georgia Alternative Assessment that the students will be taking. They will do great! We are all looking forward to a great week this week before the break. We hope you all have a safe and relaxing Spring Break! Ms. White and Ms. Harris March 18-22
Hi Fair Oaks Families! Spring is here! Wednesday celebrates the first day of Spring - yay! We have a fun week this week. We are going to be all about STEM this week, which means Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Our focus this month is about our farm unit, which leads into all kinds of fun topics and discussions. Last week we talked about nutrition and food, which we will talk a lot more about next month in April. This week we are going to be doing a little more exploring with food in science, along with some map skills in social studies, and some math skills as well. We are starting off the week with planting our very own vegetable garden! Each student will be getting their own different vegetable seeds to plant in a cup and they will be in charge of taking care and watering them for the rest of the year. We will be watching the seeds take root and grow! On Tuesday we will be exploring real life vegetables and doing scientific observations of them while looking at non-fiction texts and learning about the life cycle of a plant. Wednesday we will be learning more about map skills and we will be creating our own map of what we would like our farm to look like if we could build one ourselves. This helps the students with spatial reasoning as well as functional skills of the world around them. Thursday and Friday we will be focusing more on math and working on number skills and counting. Some students who have been mastering their counting skills will be moving on to their higher counting skills. We are happy to see there will be nicer weather this week and look forward to doing more activities outside! Next week is going to be a busy week for us. Look out for a field trip form for the Adapted Field day this week. On Tuesday the 26th we have a field trip to the MLK center downtown with 5th grade we are really excited about! Wed the 27th is the 3rd quarter awards ceremony. Invitations will be sent home this week. The Adapted field day will be the 28th from 10-12pm at Osborne high school. This is a chance for all of our students to celebrate doing so well this year in PE, even the students who are not in ADPE anymore. We are looking forward to it! The last week of March is also the beginning of GAA testing. Students will be pulled to test during the day. They will have until the end of April to finish. They will do great! 😊 Here are a few pictures from this past week! March 4-8th,
Hi everyone, we are in a new month and Spring is almost here! With a new month comes a new unit in our classroom. This month we are going to be talking all about farm life. From animals, to plant life, there are lots of interesting topics to discuss. We are also going to be reading a chapter book, Charlotte's Web. We love reading this book in our classroom with all the interesting animals and storylines the students can discuss. In reading this week we will be introducing the farm animals and comparing them to other types of animals, like zoo animals. Can you tell what kinds of animals belong on the farm and what kinds belong in the zoo? We will also be discussing the characteristics of two of our Charlotte's Web characters, the spider and the sheep. One day the students will be creating their own spider out of cookies and pretzels with a math activity, and another day they will be learning more about the sheep by creating a sheep using a paper plate and cotton balls. We love doing hands on activities in the classroom that enhances learning even more, especially if you get to eat some of it! We are also incorporating reading and math together by having the students create their own counting emergent reader books this week. The students love when they get to create their own books to take home and this week we are making math books. The students are doing so well with their number identification and counting, why not add it to reading too? We have one more exciting event happening this week. On Friday, we are going on our field trip to Kennesaw Mountain with 4th grade! We are super excited about this and can't wait to spend the day with our book buddy friends! Feb 11-15
Hi everyone, we are one week away from our February break! This week we are officially opening our Fair Oaks coffee cart with the MOID and PreK students. We are super excited about this! We did our trial run last week and it ran perfectly. The students were so pumped and ready to show off their job skills. We also have our Valentine’s lunch this Thursday the 14th if you are interested in coming to eat with your child. We will also eat in our rooms on Tuesday and Wednesday if you are unable to make it in Thursday, just return the letter we sent home and let us know when you can come. We are continuing our unit theme of community helpers this week. Last week we focused all about the doctor and how doctors help people and what kind of tools they use to do so. The students did such a great job learning about this and were very focused! On Friday, Officer Shepard – our resource officer – came and talked to our class and Ms. Cole’s class about being a police officer. The students took turns asking different questions using picture symbols. They learned all about what Officer Shepard does and how she helps our community. They even got their own sticker badges as junior police! This week we are learning about another community helper, the mailman. Students will read stories about mailmen and women and work on different job skills that they could use to help in the mail room. Students will also be working on their letter knowledge (see the pun there J) using the theme as well. On Thursday, we will be changing the focus to Valentine’s Day themed activities. We will be doing Valentine’s math centers and will be working with candy hearts as manipulatives (yum!). We will also be making cookies for Valentine’s as well! This past Saturday the school pantry opened its doors to any families who participate. If any questions come up about this, please ask us and we will find the answers for you. We are looking forward to a great week. One more till break! Ms. White and Ms. Harris February 4-8
Hello again Fair Oaks families! We are in the beginning of a new month – February! We are doing a lot of exciting things this month so stay tuned! In the classroom this week we are focusing all about reading and our new unit, Community Helpers. Most of the week we will be focusing on a very important community helper, the doctor. The students will learn all about what doctors do to help people and how they themselves can become more aware about their health at home. We will be reading the story, “Doctor Jen” about a family who goes to their doctor for many different things. Students will learn more about how everyone goes to the doctor to feel better and make sure they are healthy. We will also be working with different doctor tools by doing pretend play, as well as labeling and identifying the tools. Students will get to pretend to be the doctor by using band aids to help a hurt friend. Students will also be learning about how and when to dial 911, as well as when NOT to dial 911! We will use the play phone to practice. We would love if you all could talk with your child as well about this important skill. You never know when they will need to use it! Finally Friday we will be learning about another important community helper, the taxi driver. Students will read a book about taxis and then become a taxi driver themselves and will have to “drive” around the room to do their different tasks to collect fares. This is a very fun, exciting, and educational unit this month and we are happy to begin it. We would like to see if we will be able to even make a mini field trip to the fire station that is across the street to meet first hand some firefighters and where they work. Hopefully we can get that arranged! We are also beginning something really fun this year, which is our special education coffee cart. We are working with Ms. Cole and PreK’s classes to create a coffee cart for the teachers to come to a couple times a week. We are hoping to raise funds for future classroom needs (and maybe some fun CBI trips!) Our students will be running the coffee cart themselves, where they will take the teacher’s order, use their communication system to tell the teacher what they are selling, make the coffee (pulling a lever with adult assistance), and collecting the money from the teacher. We are SUPER excited about this adventure. We have received help from Rev Coffee in Smyrna as well as our friends from the transition academy at Osborne High School. This week we will be doing a practice week to have the students learn how to run the cart, then we will officially begin next week! Once we have official days and times we will let families know in case you would like to come get some coffee from your child! We are also going to have assistance from our 5th grade peer helpers in Mr. Petrusic and Ms. Sheddan’s classes who we love working with. Can’t wait to get started! Ms. White and Ms. Harris One more thing, next week we are going to have family Valentine’s lunches with our classes at the school. We are sending home the flyer for you to see. Our class will be eating our lunch on Thursday the 14th. If you are unable to come on Thursday to eat with your child, we will be eating in our rooms on Tuesday and Wednesday if you would like to come then. Please just let us know J January 28th to February 1st
Hi families! We are looking forward to another great week here at school. Hopefully the snow won’t be too much of an issue this week! This week we are finishing up our weather unit. We are beginning by talking about what to wear in cold weather (perfect for this week!). Students will be matching clothing items on pictures as well as practicing dressing themselves with winter clothing. We will be reading the story “Out in the Snow” about a boy who is trying to get dressed to go outside in the snow, but the students have to work to figure out if he is ready or not. This is a great story about working on YES and NO questions. The rest of the week we will be having lessons on different types of weather patterns (rain, lightning, rainbows, sunshine, wind, etc.). The students will learn about what the pattern is and how it is made, then they will be working on their pre-writing skills to create their own pictures of the weather pattern. We may even get to play around with creating some weather with our hands! We will also be going to Ms. Evans’s 4th grade class for our book buddies, but instead we will be doing SCIENCE buddies this week! We are going to be doing the experiment from our book of the month Sunshine Makes the Seasons. The experiment involves using an orange and a pencil to make the Earth and a flashlight for the Sun. Students will work on creating live models of the Sun and the Earth to show how the Sun creates the weather (what parts of the Earth are warm and cold?). We absolutely love getting to work with Ms. Evans’s classroom and are excited about this lesson! Hope everyone has a great week! Ms. White and Ms. Harris January 21-25 Hi Eagle families! We are having a shorter school week this week due to the MLK holiday on Monday. Also, as a reminder we have our awards day this Thursday the 24th from 1:15-2:00pm if you would like to attend. This week we are focusing on the Winter theme. We are continuing to read The Mitten, by Jan Brett. We will be focusing on the characters in the story and trying to sequence the events of the story. Students will also be doing a writing piece on what kind of animal they would find in their mitten. We are also creating a mini book in reading about the month of January. Students will be following directions to put the story in order and assemble their book. In math we will be working on finding different ways to write numbers 1-10. We will also be having daily living lessons to learn what kind of clothing we need to wear with the different types of weather. This past week we went on our second Community Based Instruction trip. We went to Target. The students did such a great job touring the store and helping find supplies needed for the classroom. The students also used their own money to purchase something to wear when it is cold. All of our students chose to buy a new pair of gloves. They were so excited looking through all the different types and were very proud of their choices. Good work friends! Hope everyone has a great long weekend and we will see you on Tuesday! Ms. White and Ms. Harris Here are a few pictures from the past week: Above Ms. Harris did a cooking lesson where the students had to make snickerdoodles. They loved mixing the ingredients and smelling the yummy cinnamon!
December 10-14th
Hi everyone, this is our last full week before the holiday break. Next week we will have two early release days on Thursday and Friday, so please be prepared to receive your kids off the bus at the early time. This week we are finishing our Gingerbread Man unit. We are working on character identification and letter knowledge in reading. In math we will be working on number counting and identification from 1-10. We are also going to be working on daily living skills, like what kinds of chores can you do at home to help out? In drama class this week with Mrs. Kratz, our class will be performing The Gingerbread Man. Each student has a character from the book and Ms. White will be narrating the story. The students will be using assistive technology devices to play each of their characters. They will also have props (stuffed animals of their character) to act out the play. We might even be seen on the announcements at school! Thank you to the administrators and teachers who helped play the voices for our characters! We are looking forward to a fun week here at school. The break is almost here!! J Ms. White and Ms. Harris December 3-7th
Hello everyone! Thank you for stopping by our MOID blog for Ms. White and Ms. Harris’s classroom! This week we are beginning our new unit for December, which is the Gingerbread Man. This is such a fun story to read with the kids. We are going to be using the story this week in reading AND in math. In reading we will introduce the story and work on character identification and story sequencing. In math we will be using parts of the story while we work on graphing and patterning. We are also going to be focusing on our writing skills with some pre-writing lines and shape tracing. As always in our classroom we work on our functional skills that they can use at home as well. Last week we made placemats to use during classroom mealtimes (cooking and snack). On our placemats we worked on setting the table. This gives them a visual model of where their cup, plate, napkin, and silverware should go when they eat. We are focusing a lot this year on independence and having the students do as much on their own as they can. They have been wowing us with what they have shown us they can do this year! All of the students are beginning to show great growth in reading, writing, and math. We are doing lessons on matching words, which was a struggle in the past, and they are blowing us away! We are so proud of each of our students and cannot wait to see what the rest of the year shows! Ms. White and Ms. Harris ** Here is a highlight of our students working with Ms. Harris last week. They love having her in the classroom! In the first picture, Devon is working with Ms. Harris on making a booklet about the colors of Fall. She is helping him with his coloring and showing him where he is supposed to color. In the next picture, all of the students are sitting down to a cooking lesson done by Ms. Harris – tomato soup and grilled cheese. They LOVE cooking and being able to participate in making their own food. Each student added the cheese to their bread and Ms. Harris grilled the sandwiches for them. The students also helped to open the can of soup, season it, and stir it! This week our cooking is all about the Hour of Code. We will be making codes (or patterns) out of fruit and making fruit skewers – Yum! |
Jenny WhiteHi my name is Jenny White and I teach the grades 3-5 MOID students here at Fair Oaks Elementary. This is my third year here at the Oaks and I love it more every day! I just finished my Masters of Education in Multiple/Severe Intellectual Disabilities at Georgia State and cannot wait to see where this year takes us in the classroom where we will strive to Be Our Best Every Day!! Archives
April 2019
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