Week 13

This weather has been crazy this week! We had beautiful weather in the 80's and then nearly freezing temperatures and pouring down rain the next day. That's Texas weather for you. I hope that you have a nice weekend and have plans to stay indoors.

This week, our focus book was Duck on a Bike. We looked at characters, setting and plot.

Some of my former students came back to read to our class.

We added a turkey poem to our poetry notebooks.

We reviewed our letters and sight words this week. We learned two new reading strategies. Lips the Fish tells us to get our lips ready and say the first sound in the word we are trying to read.

Chunky Monkey teaches us to break the word down and look for chunks in the bigger words.

In math, we began a unit on measuring. We read this book to introduce us to measuring and standard units of measurement.

We practiced our skills measuring with unifix cubes.

In science, we continued learning about objects in the sky. We started by reading about the sun.

Zoey was our sun and we talked about what makes day and night by using the globe as a reference.

We read a fun book about the moon.

Then we read some non-fiction books and wrote down facts that we learned about the moon.

We painted moons using glue to make craters and then we water-colored them. 

We wrote our facts down underneath the paintings. These are up on the bulletin board outside my room.

We simulated how craters are made by dropping ping pong balls into flour.

We read a book about what it would be like to go to the moon.

We talked about phases of the moon and read this book that showed many of them.

Then we made moon phases using Oreos. This was so much fun!

We finished up our week by learning about the stars. We also learned that shooting stars are not stars at all, but pieces of rock or iron that burn up in the atmosphere. 

We've had a bit of difficulty with tattling. We read this book and talked about the difference between telling and reporting. Also, Mrs. Phillips talked about Kelso's choices and big/little problems during her counseling visit.

In social studies, we began talking about the Pilgrims.

We learned what it was like to live long ago.

We made Pilgrim and Native American hats.

And we wore them to lunch on Thursday when they served the Thanksgiving lunch in the cafeteria.

We learned the story of the First Thanksgiving and made bracelets. Each color represents something from the story that we learned. Ask me to tell the story back to you.

We read some fun Thanksgiving books.

Due to the rain, we missed Hill Harbor and recess on Friday, so we ended our week with a game and craft afternoon. We had fun learning new games and creating crafts.