First Week of School

School year 2012-2013 officially started on August 14th, 3 weeks earlier than the previous years. This will definitely get the students much more prepared for the state tests. Pali took no exception to this early start, our students joined more than 600,000 students across the district that went back to school on this day.

Room 20 welcomed back three of it's students: Tristen and Shahin (4th Grade) and Tyler (5th Grade). They will be joined this year by a new student in 3rd Grade, Diana. Two more are expected to return in a couple of days, Dylan (3rd) and Tom (5th).

Room 20 

Welcome Card from Mr. Ramos

The class is very fortunate to have Mrs.B on board as Instructional Assistant. She has a lot to offer in ensuring the continuity of the highly successful academic program that Mrs. Sidman had started.

It is our pleasure to open our classroom and we can't wait to tell many success stories of the kids this year as they move up to a new grade and have new experiences that their grade levels have to offer.

Student desks

Our classroom will soon be the main hub for reading, math, inquiry projects, and assessments. It is slowly getting filled with books, manipulatives, anchor charts, and supplies. More importantly, it is getting filled with ideas, questions, wonderings, and thoughts.

"Scholarliness"

Our Tribes folder has also been used a lot. Team 20 has been really very good with identifying their trible and complying to the Four Tribes Community Agreements. We are focusing on Honesty as core value of the month.

Tribes Wall

We had a mixing class with Ms. Choi's 5th Grade class to "Save Fred." This is an activity that reinforces the skills necessary for problem-solving in science. We all got to save Fred and got free sugar-free gummy worms afterwards.

Save Fred

Science Wall

We use EnVision Math and all grade levels start with lesson on numeration. Fifth grade takes it a step further learning about decimals.

Math Concept Wall

Our Reading Concept/Question Wall is probably the busiest as we use Treasures, Triumphs, and Core Literature books for 3rd, 4th, and 5th. We started reading The Trumpet of the Swan for our Novel Studies and we are also reading historical and realistic fiction selections from Treasures. We have also started learning vocabulary strategies and "playing" with words- learning about idioms, word etymology, toponyms, eponyms, etc.

Reading Concept/Question Wall

We are in the process of getting more books for our classroom library. We also hope to update our board games.

Classroom Library

We got started with Writer's Workshop right away. The students have done their "heart" and are in the process of writing their seed stories.

Writing Wall

This is proving to be a very promising year with the students all ready to learn and starting on a good note.