Snowy Days...

Hi everyone!
It was a super short week, so here is a super short summary!

Extension of lessons
Can you believe all of the snow we are still digging our way out of? Due to the shortened week at school, I've decided to extend our reading, spelling, and grammar lessons through next week. So the children will be taking their assessments in these areas this week.

Reading
Our theme this week/next week is "Animal Needs." New vocabulary words we are practicing include: preen, nibbles, itches, puddles, beasts, and handy.  We are identifying words with inflected endings (in particular the words that end in s or es when they are made plural.) The children are also learning to identify linking verbs. These verbs are more difficult to locate because they don't show an action the same way regular verbs do. We focused on: am, are, was, and were. We read a new whole group story called "Splish Splash, Animal Baths." In this story we read about several different animals and the way they keep themselves clean. This allowed us to practice our comprehension strategy of the week, which was compare/contrast. The children did a terrific job of comparing the animals (the elephant and duck both use water to clean themselves) and contrast (the pig soothes its skin by rolling in the mud, while the grizzly bear will rub its back against a tree.) We have some really great thinkers in our class!

Math
The children continue to work their way through the solving of story problems. We have learned how to regroup with subtraction (borrow from the tens place first to share with the ones place.) We've practiced using a variety of organizers to help us solve problems including the Part-Part-Total, Start-Change-End, and more recently the Quantity-Quantity-Difference. This week the children worked to sort a set number of items into equal groups. An easy way to solve these problems is to create an array (an even number of items in each row and column- 4x2, 3x5, etc.) These are beginning multiplication problems, and the use of counters and drawing pictures is helpful as we familiarize ourselves with the concept!

The children DO have a math homelink due on Monday! Thank you for helping to remind them!

Science
Our little habitat researchers are hard at work. The children have been broken into small habitat research groups. They have the SAME graphic organizer that we used during our studies on the rainforest. In their groups, the children are working to learn facts about each of the categories on their organizer, including: what it looks like, its climate, animals, plants, human uses, and human impact. It is fascinating watching the children work together and take on this portion of their learning at a more independent level. They will be creating a keynote presentation to summarize their learning in a few short weeks.

Fighting Germs

The children and I frequently "debug" our classroom of pesky germs with the Clorox/antibacterial wipes you sent in at the beginning of the year with your child's school supplies. Unfortunately, we have run out of wipes before the end of the cold and flu season! If you happen to have some extra antibacterial wipes at home that you would like to contribute to our class, we would welcome them! Thank you for helping us keep our health and wellness a priority!

                                   I hope you are enjoying the weekend, and staying warm, too!