Week of December 3rd

I can't believe it's December! Where has the time gone. This week we have started talking about characters in our stories during independent reading. In Guided reading groups we are working on reading response questions and how we need to turn around the question and put it into our response when answering the questions. In writing we continue to work on our Information text books. They are coming along nicely. We are publishing these books and will share them with families after the Holiday break. In Social Studies we are learning about how the Iroquois Native Americans lived. We will use the information we learn about the Iroquois and compare it to our lives today. For our final project we will choose which time we would rather live in and explain our reasons why in writing or by creating a project. For math our core idea right now is that Mathematicians use strategies to solve addition and subtraction problems quickly. Together as a class we are coming up with generalizations to help us solve these problems quickly. So far we have come up with a generalizations for adding/subtracting zero and adding/subtracting one. We started adding/subtracting two and will finish this on Monday. To come up with these generalizations (I can use math to show why something is always true...)students solved some examples and then thought of what strategies they used to get their answers. Check out the examples below along with our new Generalization bulletin board. Students have come up with some generalizations about odd and even numbers as well. Your children are becoming advanced math thinkers. It's nice to see them come up with these generalizations on their own as opposed to just telling them.