We had a great field trip to see 'Skippyjon Jones Snow What' a couple of weeks ago. Please see the bottom of this post for pictures from our trip.
We celebrated Earth Day by decorating pots and planting Marigold seeds with the class moms a couple of weeks ago, too! I've heard that the seeds have sprouted and are beginning to grow!
We also did a fun experiment with sponges in the Discovery Lab to show how a cactus' waxy coating helps it retain water, Officer Paul came to visit, we went to the book fair, and we celebrated Arbor Day! Whew!
Here's what we've been working on in the classroom:
Reading : We've been working on visualizing and inferring with poetry. Poets tend to use strong language that make it easier to visualize and infer the author's meaning, so we've been doing a lot of work with poems. Most of the poems that we've worked with are in the poetry section of your child's binder. The students spent a lot of time reading poems and being detectives, trying to figure out what the author of the poem was talking about. Try it at home! Have you child read you a poem without him/her telling you what the title is and see if you can figure out what the author is talking about.
Writing : The students are just about done with their All About books. Ask your child what he/she has written about!
Math : We had a lot of fun with unit 8 in math. The students got an introduction to fractions by learning about equal shares, halves, and fourths. They also learned about 3-d dimensional shapes and creating composite shapes (putting a few shapes together to make a different shape). Towards the end of the unit, we went over telling time to the half hour and deepened the students' understanding of the number grid by working on number-grid puzzles. Next week, we'll be starting our last math unit - unit 9!
Science : The students have been learning all about the desert lately. Ask your child what he/she knows!
Here are some pictures of the students doing and checking up on our cactus experiment (with sponges), on the field trip, and planting seeds for Arbor day: