Week 7

It was great meeting with you during parent conferences this week. We appreciate you taking the time to discuss your child's education. We also hope that this blog helps to keep you in the know too. Let's take a look at what is happening this week.

Reading strategies are very important when we are stuck on a word. This anchor chart shows the strategies that we learned this week.

When the word does not match the letters, we learned to switch it up. Below is an example of one of the many words we switched. Is it alligator or crocodile?

Another strategy is to flip the vowel sounds in the word. We worked on this with Flippy the Dolphin. When the short vowel sound doesn't work, try the long vowel sound.

Skippy the Frog teaches us to skip the word we don't know, read to the end of the sentence and then hop back to the beginning and read it again. Sometimes we can figure out the word in context. We practiced this strategy by playing Guess the Covered Word. We liked it so much we wanted to play again and again. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of this activity. 

We practiced looking through the word. This means if you see pictures of something those words might be in the story. In the example we did, we looked at The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Words like "Gruff" and "goat" and "grass" appear throughout the book. We have to look at the whole word because they all start with g to determine which word is the correct one.

Our word family this week was the "ow" word family. We learned that this family has two sounds. We practiced flipping the sound when we were brainstorming words to determine which sound made sense.

We worked on Fix It Up Sentences this week. These mistakes that can be easily fixed are a first step in the editing process and a reminder to us to fix up our own writing.

We read the book, Teamwork and talked about the author's purpose. This book was written to inform. We read a fable, The Great Rope Tug and the purpose was to teach us a lesson. Sometimes, an author's purpose is just to entertain us.

In writing, we are learning to use descriptive words. Mrs. Langham brought us a present. 

We had to use descriptive words to describe the bag during our writing.

On Tuesday, we got to open the present and were happy to find Pop Rocks inside. We talked about using our five senses to describe the candy that we tasted. I love the expressions on their faces. Many had never tried Pop Rocks before. It was a lot of fun!

Then we wrote about our experience using descriptive words using our five senses.

The next day, we talked about similes. We compared the Pop Rocks exploding in our mouth to other things that exploded or popped and we illustrated them.

A culminating activity put all of our experiences from the week together into a writing project with a craft. We had so much fun making these. Mrs. Hobbs's class will get to look forward to making these on Monday as I was unexpectedly sick on Friday and did not want to leave this difficult project with a sub.

During our traveling Tuesday rotation, we learned about Christopher Columbus. Here are a few of the activities that we did.

What a fun and busy week. We made a scientific mess when we made Oobleck - it was everywhere! We recorded our observations and then predicted what items would sink or float in the Oobleck.

We blew up a balloon when we added a solid (baking soda) with a liquid (vinegar). The combination created a gas! Science is so cool!

We know a lot about matter. We have wonderings, too!

In the computer lab we worked on Learning.com and visited a new site, abcya.com. 

Probably the most exciting part of our week, was getting out our netbooks during Math Choice.

Actually, the highlight could be when Ms. Rosso came into the classroom and taught us how to play a Math Pentathlon game called Kings and Quadraphages. It's a great brain booster!

We read a really good nonfiction book that got us thinking about Go and Whoa beverages. Do you know how many tablespoons of sugar are in a soda versus 100% fruit juice? There is a big difference.

We played a new Math game called Not Hidded/Hidden. 

On the 30th day of school, we read a book about celebrating your importance and then used bingo markers to create art with 30 dots.

We also played Quick Images, solved a Math story or two, and used a T-chart to find number combinations.

Not only did we have Traveling Tuesday where we learned about Christopher Columbus, 

but we also learned about the calendar. We sorted months.

Wrote about the past and present.

We read a book about the months of the year.

We saw two videos.

We also heard stories that taught us we can always find something in common with new friends and that sharing equally can be tricky.

Thanks for taking a look at our week!