Week of January 25 - 29, 2010

We actually had a full week of school with no early dismissals, snow days or holidays! In Writer's Workshop we finalized our poems for our Poetry Journal and chose one to publish. Our Poetry Publishing Party on Friday was a grand finale for our Poetry Unit. Next week we will begin our non-fiction wirting unit with a focus on writing about famous Americans. In Reader's Workshop the highlight was opening our listening station. We heard "The Mitten" which includes the robust vocabulary words that we worked on this week. We finished up math unit 3: "Solving Story Problems" and are moving onto unit 4: "What Would You Rather Be?" This unit focuses on sorting strategies according to different attributes and collecting, representing and comparing data. Remember that you can go on line to learn more about our math program at pearsonsuccess.net. We finished our science unit on matter with hot chocolate and bubbles. Can you guess which matter we were learning about? If not, ask your child! Next week we will begin our social studies unit called "History and Famous Americans." This will involve the fun "Hero Project" that your child will be working on at school and at home.

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Poetry Publishing Party

Our Poetry Publishing Party was well attended by parents and teachers. It was great fun to share our poetry journals with all who were present. We had a nice surprise after the party when our principal arrived with special pencils that say "I Love to Write." We do!

Horton Hatches a New Buddy

Our new community book is an old favorite, Horton Hatches an Egg. We read it with our buddies and then had the opportunity to discuss what it means to be responsible and faithful just like Horton. We got our creative juices flowing with the prompt to cross two animals (just like Horton's elephant and Mayzie's bird) to come up with a brand new animal. We created lots of new friends such as a giraffigator, dolphippo and a dinomonkey, among others!

Weeks of January 11 - 22, 2010

We started writing poetry at the beginning of last week and are enjoying this creative process. We have been using different formats such an acrostic poem and text innovations to reach our inner poets! We are learning about nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs and how to put them together in clever ways, The children have a great sense of rhythm and are catching on brilliantly. We will share our poems with parents next week at our Publishing Party. In math we continued our study of comparing numbers and addition and subtraction. Also, we are beginning to look at a hundreds chart and count large quantities of numbers while finding patterns as we count. We began a new science unit on matter and will be experimenting with solids, liquids and gases in the coming week.

How high can you write?

In Math Workshop we have been counting lots of things with an emphasis on keeping track of counting large quantities and different strategies to use. We also challenged ourselves to see how many numbers we could write starting at 0, We'll keep adding to our number tapes next week too!

Pajama Day!

It was fun to wear our pajamas to school as part of a Spirit Day for the whole school. Even though we were in our pj's we still worked and played hard! We even got to see a little snow!

Experts at Estimating

Thanks to classmates Ryan and Devin, our class won a mancala game for getting the closest estimate for the schoolwide estimation jar on Math Day. Our weekly practice of estimating really paid off for us!