Snowstorm post!

Learning about compassion and empathy

Our reading workshop focus:

Our mentor texts:

Amelia Bedelia books are  chock full of playful language!

  

 

In writing we are learning how to write our opinions about books in the form of a letter.

For their first letters, they choose a book I read to them, and formed an opinion about a character's trait.  Every day we worked on a different section of the letters.  Here are the finished ones:

Now they are going to work with more and more independence.  They have chosen a new book and decided what strong opinion about this book they are going to write about.  Notice that they are learning to back up their opinion with evidence from the text.

In math we always start with a few warm up activities that they do on white boards.

We have been working hard solving story problems.  

Mathematicians....

choose a strategy and show their work

write the math equation that matches their work

write their answer in a complete sentence

After solving several like this, they created their own.  

These were photocopied and now we are solving each others' problems-so fun!

 

 

This week we finish them and will correct our work.  

We are also learning how to access a new math program called Fastmath.

Snapshots of art class with Ms. Joy:

Yoga with Mrs. Servin-rotating small groups go 3 days a week.  I had a chance to join them one morning and it was a perfect way to start my day!

Celebrating a January birthday!

Another short post!

Readers are working on fluency skills.  Noticing dialogues tags like these help us make our voice match the text.  Ask your child to show you the dialogue tags in these pages.

Mathematicians are hard at work on a story problem project-lots more about it next week!

Here is a glimpse of the work we are doing with graphs.  Being shown a graph we are deciding on the survey question that may have been asked and what we can learn from the graph.

 

Learning about compassion.

Ask your child what the boy looking on could do in this situation.

A January birthday celebration!

Short Week, Short Post!

Welcome back!  We are kicking off the new year with new units in reading and writing.

In reading we are focusing on how to make our reading more fluent.  Our three strategies so far are:



Ask your child how we use punctuation and dialogue tags to help us read more fluently!

 

In writing we are going to begin an opinion writing unit were we will write our opinions about the books we read.  To start off I read the class Mercy Watson to the Rescue.  In the book several characters have very strong opinions about whether pigs should live in houses or on a farm.  We practiced stating our opinions explaining why we feel that way.

Next we made a list of many of the books that I have read aloud to the class.  We practiced listing characters traits for some of the characters and proving it with examples from the book.

Then the class helped me focus in on Mercy.  Here is what we came up with:

Now each child is recording these details about the characters they chose.  Next week we will use these to start our first opinion piece.

In math we are always working to strengthen our place value skills!

Our two new mentor texts for reading and writing: