Monday, January 5th 2009

Our first day of school back in 2009 was busy! We started off our day with new word study sorts for the week. Our question of the day was: Did you have a good vacation? We learned that almost all of our friends did have a great vacation. During writing workshop, we graduated to our new topic: How To-books. We have started our unit learning about how to write step-by step directions to teach someone something. We started brainstorming ideas to write about, and are going to begin our step-by-step directions tomorrow. During reading workshop, we read our new poems: The Warm, Wooly, White, Winter Mitten and The Life of Father Christmas. Our friends who practiced the Mitten learned a new word: numb, and our friends who read the poem about Father Christmas learned what we use accents for, and practiced finding them in the poem.

This afternoon, we began our read aloud learning about non-fiction. We talked about what we think we know about non-fiction, what we have questions about, and used this when we read our book about Hippos. During our read aloud about hippos, we learned that their babies weigh 85 pounds, and they drink milk. In handwriting, the red rhinos reviewed the lowercase letter y, and the green gators practiced the letter Z.

During math, the green gators practiced using a life-sized number line to walk on and reviewed more than and less than. They also read a book, and thought about things in our world that are made of different shapes. The red rhinos practiced using a tens-frame, and reviewed ones and tens place. They also started a new unit on Geometry, and reviewed 2-dimensional shapes, as well as started learning new terms for 3-dimensional shapes.