Week 19

Week 19 was a short week, due to the MLK holiday and our snow day. We learned about the letter Ff with the help of Funny Fish.

Our focus book of the week was Animal Babies ABC. Our sight words were "on" and "play". We worked on First, Next, Then and Last in our writing journals.

In science, we continued our talk about polar animals. This week, our animal was the penguin. We once again created a schema chart about the penguin.

We read books non-fiction about penguins. We created our own All About Penguins book, even designing our own cover.

We also enjoyed some nonfiction books about Tacky the Penguin.

We made a penguin craft.

The blubber experiment was lots of fun! We made a blubber glove and tested to see which hand could stay in the ice the longest. Now we understand how these polar animals stay warm.

In math, we continued learning about 3D shapes. We applied our learning as we created 3D shapes out of marshmallows and toothpicks.

We continued learning about famous Black Americans too. Here are a few of the books that we read.

Our 100th day of school is next week. I am still in need of items to make our snack. Please check out the wish list tab of this blog's home page and e-mail what you can bring. Also, I am still in need of Tile Time volunteers. If you can help out, please e-mail with your day preference. It will be either on Monday, Tuesday or Friday from 11:15-12:15. Right now, I have one vote for Monday, one for Tuesday and two on Friday. I would love to have 4 volunteers if possible. The majority will win.

Week 18

We continued on our study of Arctic animals. This week, we focused on the polar bear.

We read books about polar bears.

We created a schema chart with facts we learned after reading.

We made All About Polar Bear books.

We had fun making polar bears.

We concluded our week by watching the movie, Arctic Tales.

In language arts our focus book was Mama Cat Has Three Kittens. We worked on making predictions and inferring. 

Here was another fun book that we read. We practiced making predictions as we read this book. 

We learned a new letter, Oo, with the help of Octopus Stew. This 9 weeks, the students are expected to know both sounds that vowels make, so please work with that at home Vowel sounds are difficult and usually the last letter sounds learned. Our sight word was "is".

Jan Brett is a wonderful author and illustrator. We enjoyed reading some of her books. We practiced beginning, middle and end after reading this story.

And we made text to text connections after reading this book that sounded similar to another book about three bears.

In math, we continued discussing 3D shapes. We compared them to objects in the world and counted the faces, edges and vertices on each. We wrote about them in our math journals.

In social studies, we began learning about famous Black Americans. The first person that we learned about was Ruby Bridges. We understood how unfair it was to be segregated in schools.

We learned about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad and how she helped to free over 300 slaves.

And we began learning about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the difference he has made in our lives. 

Here is a craft we made to represent MLK's dream.

We will be out of school on Monday in honor of this wonderful man. Have a nice, long weekend!

Week 17

Welcome Back! It was good to see everyone's smiling faces. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday. I got to spend 10 days in Colorado visiting my daughter's family and catching up with my grandson. It was very nice and very cold!

We said goodbye to 2013 and welcomed in 2014. We learned what a resolution was too.

Then we set personal goals and wrote our own resolutions. These are displayed outside our door.

We started a unit on walruses this week! We wrote down what information we already knew about them. We read some new books and wrote down what we learned. We also had to move a few of our facts into misconceptions.

Here are some of the books we read.

We learned about characteristics of nonfiction (expository text) and we made our own All About Walruses book. 

Then we enjoyed making walruses.

We also read a fiction book. We made a text to self connection.

We learned a new reading strategy. Flippy the Dolphin reminds us to flip the vowel sound when decoding words. Our new sight word this week was "us". 

In math, we began learning 3D shapes and finding object that look like them. These are the shapes we have learned so far.

And here is someone using lots of 3D shapes to make a beautiful castle!