Thursday, January 22nd

Today we worked very hard. This morning our morning message was in Spanish. We did a great job filling in words like hoy, de, son, el and punctuation marks like the exclamation point. The question of the day today was...How do you get to your favorite returant (Como Vas a tu restaurante favorito?). We learned that 37 people get to their favorite resturant by car and 4 people get to their favorite resturant by bycicle. We wrote the number sentence 37>4. During reading workshop, we learned another convention that we find in non-fiction texts. We learned that sometimes the author uses close-ups to help the reader see tiny details in very small objects. Today's word study activity was speed sort. Mrs. Helfer and Mrs. Wesley were amazed at how quickly some of us were able to sort our words!

We started our afternoon off with writing workshop. The Green Gators continued their work on their "How To Books. " Today we learned how to examine our written work to make sure that we have not forgotten any of the important steps that someone would need to take when following our directions. Mrs. Helfer is impressed at our use of leads to draw the reader in and our ability to use transition words like next, then, and after that. The red rhinos also worked on their how to books and used our writing partenrs to help them check their writing to be sure that had not forgotten any important steps int heir directions. We ended the afternoon with mathematics. We once again began with a number talk around a story problem. We are getting pretty good at learning to identify what the problem is asking us to do and developing a strategy for solving the problem. After our number talk, the green gators got out the number line. They practiced identifying numbers, determining greater than and less than, and figuring out how many more. After our number line work, we worked on using shapes to fill in puzzles. We are learning that there are some special relationships that exist among 2-D shapes. We learned that the same area can be filled in by 1 hexagon, 6 triangles, 3 rhombus, and 2 trapezoids. The red rhinos also worked on using shapes to fill in puzzles and creating a desing using a certain number of shapes. Mrs. Wesley is proud of the rhinos for knowing how to say their shapes in spanish!