Week of December 12th

This week in math we worked on solving several lobster problems trying to figure out how many were left, how many legs there were on a certain amount of lobsters, and trying to figure out how many lobsters with a given amount of legs. Then we made our own problem about lobsters. This was our third problem of the year that we have made in math and you could see the confidence growing in your children about doing these. On Wednesday they made the backgrounds and then on Thursday they planned out their problem on a white board and then conferred with me before drawing it out on their backgrounds. They were all able to come up with great problems on their own with little help from me. It was great to see. Next week the class will solve some of these problems.

In Science and Social Studies this week they continue to learn about Animals and Long Ago. In my classroom they learned about Colonial homes and about schools from long ago. They made Keeping room dioramas and then horn books. Next week we will look at Colonial time jobs. In Deb's room they talked about adaptations of animals.

In writing we are continuing with our Small Moment stories. We will be wrapping these up next week and then when we come back from our Holiday break we will look at Non-Fiction writing. We also learned about letter writing and each wrote a thank-you note to Tao for coming into our classroom last week.

On Tuesday we had a Special Visitor come to our classroom. Her name is Heather Baron and she is working with our school on Differentiated Instruction. She came to our team this week to teach the children one of the 16 Habits of Mind. We looked at the importance of questioning when learning. We talked about our visit from Tao last week and brainstormed questions that we might want to ask her using question starters such as I wonder why...., I wonder if...., I wonder how..... They came up with these in groups of 4 & 5 and then picked one burning question to share with the group. They came up with some very thought provoking questions about what Tao had shared. We will follow-up with this by asking Tao to answer some of these questions. Check out the pictures below.

Please remember that there is no school next Friday. Also there will be no homework next week since it is a short week.

Have a wonderful weekend,
Nancy