Thursday, November 20th

On this snowy day, our question of the day was Do you like winter. We learned that there were 39 children in the class that liked winter and only 1 that did not like winter. We learned that more people in our class liked winter and less people didn't like winter. In writing workshop, the green gators learned that good writers strech out their words and write all of the sounds that they hear so that their readers can read their words. The red rhinos worked on focusing our stories on the most important part, and when conferring with our partners, asking questions about information that was missing. We did a great job asking our partners questions about our stories. In the morning we also did our daily five routines. The students are learning to be much more indpendet at completeing these tasks while their teachers work with small groups of children on guided readign and word study lessons.

In the afternoon, we continued reading the book "Oh, What A Thanksgiving." We added to our Venn Diagram to compare and contrast the first Thanksgiving to our Thanksgiving. We learned that the native americans and the pilgrims ate cornbread, dried plums, deer meat, and goose on the First Thanksgiving. We learned that the first Thanksgiving was very different from our Thanksgiving, but that we celebrate for the same reasons...because we are thankful for our friends, family and homes. We are excited to try some of these foods at our tasting party on Tuesday, November 25th. In mathematics, the Red Rhinos looked at some art work. The saw a picture of some ice cream scoops. They had to use an efficient strategy to figure out how many scoops all togther. Ask your child to share the stategy that they learned. We also were faced with a challenege. The students were asked to figure out how many cats and dogs they could have if they had 12 pets in all. The green gators worked on quick images, practicing to count the number of dots that we saw on the cards. We are working on counting a set number of objects quickly.