Monday, December 8th

We are so glad we will finally have a full week of school together. This morning our question of the day was "Do you have a computer in your house?" We found out that 39 people in our class have a computer in their house and one person does not have a computer in their house. We also learned that more people in our class have a computer and less people do not have a computer in their house. During writing workshop, the green gators learned that writer's sketch their pictures to get their ideas down on paper and then go back and add detail to their drawings after they write their words. We were amazed at how much writing we were actually able to accomplish when we used this strategy. The red rhinos practiced stretching out our stories and telling part by part. The morning was also busy with our daily 5 routines. Some students read the poem into the mitten and other students read Mi Cara Redondita (My Round Face).

In the afternoon, we read the story "Clifford's Family." The students were excited to see many of the key vocabulary that they have been learning in Social Studies in this story. Ask your child what Spanish terms they remember from this story. We also spent some time practicing our handwriting. After warming-up up our hands and our fingers, the green gators reviewed and practiced making capital D and the red rhinos practiced writing words and sentences using the letters d, s, g, and e. After handwriting we started math. The red rhinos continued their quest to find out how math mathematicians use numbers efficiently. We again looked at one of Greg Tang's drawings and tried to determine how many things were all together by using an efficient strategy. We then practiced using efficient strategies when playing the game double compare. Ask your child to share with you what they learned about add numbers to 10. The green gators counted the number of letters that we have in our names, and made our names using a cube for each letter. We also learned the words for bigger than and smaller than in Spanish. In science, we are preparing to teach the next group of how to balance a shape. We decided we would teach them how to balance a circle. Ask your child how they got their circle to balance. In Social Studies we looked at a Venn Diagram, and practiced comparing ourselves and our families to another students' family. We will be finishing our Venn diagrams tomorrow.