Happy New Year!

Happy 2015! The students and I were happy to be back at school this week after a long and cozy winter vacation. With the start of the new year, we welcomed another new face in our classroom- Mrs. Kloser. Mrs. Kloser is a teaching assistant who will be providing some additional support for the children in our classroom. We are so happy to have her. What an unexpected surprise to spend two chilly days at home this week. Even though it was a short week, we accomplished so much!

Reading:

We went on to read our main selection, called “Splish! Splash! Animal Baths”.  It was full of interesting facts about how animals take baths.  Did you know that birds sit on a giraffe’s neck to pick off ticks? Pigs coat their skins in mud to stay cool.  Shrimp swim safely into a moray eel’s mouth to clean its teeth, without being eaten! Our vocabulary words include: beasts, handy, itches, nibble, preen, and puddle. The comprehension skill we focused on was comparing and contrasting.  We developed an Animal Behavior Chart that helped us take notes about these different animals and record our learning in an organized manner.

All of our guided reading groups met this week as well! The children are working on strategies that include: Predicting, Questioning, Visualizing, Inferring, Connecting, and Summarizing as they read books that closely match their reading ability. Often the children are taking notes as they read using post-it notes. It is so important to stop, think, and process what they are reading along the way. 

Grammar

The children reviewed that verbs are action words.  We then talked about how not all verbs show actions. Some are linking verbs, or verbs of "being."  These linking verbs include: is, am, and are.

Writing:

We are working this month to learn to write biographies! We spent this week reading books and watching a video highlighting the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. The children took notes and filled in a graphic organizer full of important facts that we wanted to be sure to include in our work. 

Math: 

In Unit 6, the children will be reviewing strategies for solving addition problems, and moving on to problems that have three addends.  They will be building their problem solving strategies using a variety of diagrams. They will also be creating tally charts and graphs based on given data, as well as some beginning division with sharing equal parts, and beginning multiplication using arrays.  

This week we worked on solution strategies for addition and subtraction problems as well as solving 2-digit addition and subtraction problems with number stories.  The students did a great job at writing their own number stories on their home link.  We also discussed “start-change-end”, “parts-and-total”, and “quantity, quantity, difference” number stories. The children worked to read story problems and determine which diagram would best help them solve the problem. 

Science:

Our new unit in science is about the study of rocks! All of the children will become geologists as we learn about the layers of the earth, the 3 types of rocks, fossils and more. We will be having an in-school field trip to give the children an authentic, hands-on learning experience that they will enjoy and remember. Thank you for getting those permission slips in so quickly!