Monday, January 18th, 2016

This morning we got a lot of great work completed!  Everyone arrived ready to learn.  We spent the first half hour working on Read to Self and then completed a reading letter in our journals.  The purpose of the letters is to allow students time to reflect on the books they are reading and to make plans and set goals for future reading.

Following that, we worked on our India Information books which will become a part of our Visual Journal pages.  We are gathering facts through our reading of Follow the Elephant as well as through shared reading of a variety of information books.

We wrapped up the morning with French with Mrs. Kenna.  She and her class joined us and we learned about color words in French.  Together we are working on building vocabulary so we can have simple conversations in French.  We really appreciated everyone's "growth mindset" as they challenged themselves to use these new language skills!


Good Afternoon Everyone,

Thank you, thank you, thank you!  It was a great afternoon and I missed you all very much. It seems so strange that I hadn't been here since Thursday morning.

In math today, we reviewed estimation.  We discussed when we should estimate high and when we should estimate low.  We talked about if you only have so much money and you are estimating the sum of the items to see if you have enough money then you better estimate low so you aren't stuck at the till searching for more money.

We have talked about three strategies for estimation:
1.)  Take each number to the closest 10 - or sometimes called "rounding"
   58         60
+ 21     + 20
               80
2.)  Add only the tens digit

58 has 5 tens
21 has 2 tens
so   5 tens +2 tens = 7 tens or 70

3.)  Take one number to the closest 10 

58 becomes 60
so 60 + 21 = 81

We also learned a new game,  "Climb the Ladder to 1000"   that can be played in Math by Myself and Math With Someone.

In science inquiry, the structures group reviewed what we noticed on our 360º view of Mars.  We then looked at water on Mars.  We worked on how to read a non-fiction news article.  What information we can gather from it.  The article we looked at came from Time for Kids. The title of the article "Water Found on Mars."  We discussed what this could mean to the structures that we are going to build.

We also looked at the following website:   http://mars.nasa.gov/participate/funzone/

Please take some time and play around with this website. There are a lot of great activities on the site.


In gym, we continued our work on building our cardio through floor hockey.  In our warm up we used pucks, balls and sticks as we moved around the gym.  Some of the skills we worked on were puck control and movement with the puck.  We played Musical Floor Hockey,  Circle Weave and keep away.  We had some very tired friends by the end of gym.

Many of the students are very interested in our read aloud Wonder.  A few of them shared a book trailer for the book.  If you would like to view it you can find it at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgB7_KpBDss


another good one is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy40wRmGq9c

Things to Remember:

1.)  Fun Lunch this Wednesday
2.)  Don't forget to answer the blog
3)  Raz Kids!!

Question of the Day:

Should we read the second  Wonder book? Tell me a reason why we should the second Wonder book? Auggie and Me:Three  Wonder Stories