A short but sweet week!

I hope everyone enjoyed their long 4 day weekend! The children and I hit the ground running on Wednesday and accomplished so much during the short week!

Some things to note:
1) Thank you for returning the Australian Barbecue notes so promptly! We are just about set to place our lunch order on Monday! Our Barbecue luncheon will take place on February 7.

2) We have begun our unit on persuasive writing. If you are able to send an empty cereal box to school with your child, it will help enhance a fun writing activity coming up that they are sure to enjoy! A few kids said they would be able to bring in more than one, so don't worry if your family doesn't eat cereal.

3) The kids are all buzzing about their Australian Animal research projects! It is so much fun to see their excitement. We can't wait to begin presentations on February 3rd!

As I mentioned, we have begun our persuasive writing unit! The children and I read "I Wanna Iguana" in which a little boy works hard to persuade his mother to allow him to have an iguana as a pet. The children are now working on a graphic organizer to help them persuade either their teacher or their parent to have their own pet! The creative juices are flowing!

Along with meeting in our small reading groups to work on our decoding, comprehension, and reading fluency, the children worked with a buddy to conquer this book! Their job was to read each text carefully, and work together to find "right there" answers. While reading to learn new facts about Australia, the children also worked to answer questions using complete sentences and proper spelling!

In math this week we continued to learn subtraction fact strategies. We focused on the "Count Up' strategy this week. It is used when the numbers are close together. We practiced starting at the smaller number, and simply counting up! The children also revisited the concept of subtracting two digit numbers using regrouping. They are growing more and more comfortable with this! Last of all, the children started thinking about SETS of numbers, and drew a series of pictures, tallies, and arrays to help them visualize the answer. Can you believe we are already on the brink of multiplication?! 

We started a new class read aloud story this week, an all time favorite of mine! The children are already very interested and concerned about poor little Wilbur! Reading aloud helps me to model good thinking and reading strategies out loud with the kids. We pause and think about the plot, new words, and we make predictions as we move through the story!

The kids ended their week with a fun "dance party!" They enjoyed getting their "wiggles" out in a new way after working so hard indoors this week.

Enjoy the extra few days of the weekend! Stay warm!