Cold, Snowflakes and Penguins

Happy New Year to all! It is time to really buckle down and learn a lot of new things.

Math
We are doing a unit on data and graphing. We have begun by learning that all things have attributes or different things about them by which we can describe them and sort them. We played a game called "Guess My Rule". I called kids to the front and told the children whether that child was keeping my rule or not. The Students had to study their peers and decide what my rule was. Examples: kids with stripes on their shirt, kids with freckles, kids with long sleeves. We discovered that it is just as important to know who is not keeping the rule as the ones who are. It helps us determine the rule easier. We also found that if there are 25 students in the class and 18 have long sleeves then we can figure out how many have long sleeves. We also made a bar graph of some of our data.

Next we learned about aliens called Yecktis and some basic ways to describe them. They each have a head which is shaped like a square, triangle, rhombus or hexagon. They each have 1,2,3 or 4 antennas and some have dot eyes while others have oval or doughnut eyes. We learned how to sort these Yecktis using these attributes. We could sort them using just one attribute or using a Venn Diagram we can sort them using two or three attributes.

Today we learned about surveys and how to take a survey and record our results. The children are in partnerships and are working to have each team take a survey of the class using one question and three answer choices such as: Which is your favorite icecream - vanilla, chocolate or strawberry. They will take turns surveying the class, recording the results on a tally chart and then making a pictograph to represent the data. They are learning that all graphs must have a Title, Labels and a Key.

Reading

I finished administering the Fountas and Pinnell reading inventories in December. All children gained 1 to 3 levels in their Guided Reading Levels. I will be continuing to teach them and I do have to do another District mandated test on each individual child by Feb. 11th. Several of the students are struggling with Fluency so that is what we will be working on for the next little while. Fluency includes the enthusiasm and expression we use while reading as well as phrasing, smoothness and speed of reading. These are each important as we try to improve our reading ability and our enjoyment of reading.

Spelling

This week the student's spelling words focus on r-controlled vowels. These are when a vowel sounds different because it is next to an r. We sometimes say the r is bossy so it tells the vowel how it should sound. The /or/ sound can be spelled or, ore, our, oor. The /ar/ sound is the easiest to spell. The /er/ sound is very tricky as it can be spelled with er, ir, ur and some variations. When the /er/ sound is at the end of a word it is generally spelled with the er.

Vocabulary

Today we read a fun book called "Six-Dinner Sid" about a cat who made 6 families feel like they owned him. Thus each night he got 6 dinners. The vocabulary words for this book are: damp, nasty, perfect, suspicious, gullible, and versatile. Please have fun using these words in your home and your conversations with your child.

Other

We have also been exploring fiction and non-fiction books and learning the differences. The students experience writing both fiction and non-fiction in their writing activities. I have been having the children look at some of their graded work to notice what I am looking for in their work and how they can improve their work to show that they have learned specific skills. Last week we wrote New Year's Resolutions. This week we will be learning about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and be writing about our dreams for a better world.

The keyword for this blog is "I Have a Dream".

Remember that there is no school for the students on Monday and Tuesday, January 17th and 18th. The 17th is the national holiday and the 18th is a teacher work day which coincides with the secondary schools end of quarter.

I will try to get better at keeping the blog updated. So, please keep checking here for information about your child's class and what we are learning.