Please don't forget that the students only have two days of school this week, Monday and Wednesday. Because of the short week, there will be no word wall homework this week.
Here's what we've been working on in the classroom:
Reading : We started the week by finishing up talking about various ways to get our minds ready for a book. Then, we jumped into learning all about reading strategies. Over the next couple of weeks, the students will learn about different strategies they can use to decode unknown words. Each of these strategies has an animal attached to it in order to help the students remember them. Last week, we learned about Spoon the Raccoon Detective. Spoon uses picture clues to help read tricky words. While this strategy is great some of the time, it certainly doesn't work all of the time. That's okay with Spoon though, because he's got lots of other reading strategy friends who can jump in and help out. We'll learn about another strategy next week.
Writing : We spent time last week talking about how writers get ideas. Since the students are working on personal narratives, we spoke about memories. The students worked on creating lists of possible writing ideas from different kinds of memories they have (e.x. happy memories, surprising memories, scary memories, proud memories, etc.). These writing ideas will help the students as they work on their writing pieces over the course of our next unit.
Math : After learning about change-to-more number stories a couple of weeks ago, we moved right into talking about change-to-less number stories. While learning about various kinds of number stories, we've been practicing using diagrams and number models to represent the stories. We also took the students' problem solving power up a notch by learning about how to solve for unknowns within these number stories. (For example, Ms. Buttery warmed up some slices pizza. Remi stole 2 slices off the table and there were only four slices left. How many slices of pizza did Ms. Buttery warm up in all? __ - 2 = 4)
Science : I haven't updated you on what we've been working on in science lately - sorry! We've been learning about spiders and other arachnids. The students are doing a really great job distinguishing between insects and arachnids. When we were in the Discovery Lab last week, Mr. Corcoran brought in one of his pet tarantulas, named Abby, to show the class. She was pretty cute for a spider!
Social Studies : We've been learning about various kinds of community helpers recently, which is why we went to the firehouse, so that we could get an up close look on what one kind of community helper's job looks like.
Here are some pictures of 1-Bu last week :