Our Justin Bieber version of "Baby" (aka our Doubles song) has become a staple in our room! It has helped us remember and learn our doubles which is so important to help us solve doubles +1 and doubles + 2 problems. If we know our doubles we can do this: 3+4= 7 by knowing that 3+3=6 and then add 1. OR 4+6=10 by: doing doubles + 2: so 4+4=8 and 8+2 =10 Or doing the trick: so we find the number in between 4 and 6 and double it and that's the answer. 5+5=10
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Australia is such an interesting place to learn about! It was fun to share with the class, I have a lots of friends who live there and they sent me some great pictures and information! We talked about how the landscape of Australia is mainly populated by the ocean or the edges. They have territories instead of states. They had the most fun learning about marsupials and how many different ones there were! We also learned that all babies are called Joey's (any marsupial-not just Kangaroos!) I brought in Vegemite for them to try, it was pretty much 50/50 on likeability :) Vegemite is kind of like an Australian peanut butter. When I traveled with some, they literally packed it in their suitcase and would bring it out at restaurants! The Great Barrier Reef and it's beautiful wildlife and importance to the reef and area were also topics we learned about! See if you child can recall any fun facts! For our craft we made our own coral reef full of colorful sea creatures and fish. They loved researching and looking at photographs of the wildlife. We read the Runaway Pancake, which is just a hilarious adventure of a pancake that escapes! The kids had so much fun listening and repeating the refrain! I apologize if you heard it on repeat :) I know I did! After reading, our retelling consisted of listing some of the main characters, defining the setting and writing what happened at the beginning, during the middle and then end. We have included some of our reading learning objectives by orally retelling first and working through the retelling whole group first. It gets hard to narrow when writing because many want to write too much or not enough. We are working on what details are important to include and how to say more than one thing happened without writing the whole part. Math has been a gradual transition into math workshop. Starting Monday, we will pre-assess for Topic 5. Then do a mock day of our math workshop choices. After that, we will continue and start our math workshop model: Students will rotate throughout various learning objectives and tasks. Start with whole group mini lesson and then break off into these timed tasks: Small Group teaching and work with teacher Fastt Math rotation Worksheet problems (with a partner/individual work) Math Game I will check workmats while I am working with the group and use the worksheets to to see what students are either struggling with or understand to help shape our mini lesson the next day. Topic 5 we will be adding doubles up to 9 and working on adding doubles plus one as well as other addition problems to 20. Knowing our facts will help us add other fact problems. Any extra basic fact work at home will help! Along with the stories we will reading, we will journey to each setting and learn about the people that live there, along with the food, clothing, special occasions and other unique characteristics. Our first stop will be New Orleans. There we will talk about the unique and delicious food they eat: char-grilled oysters, po-boys, jambalaya, crawfish, beignets and other good food! Hopefully try some beignets (if I can make them right-I cheated and bought a mix from Cafe Du Monde last visit down there :) Our craft will to be masks after we talk about their very intricate and historical celebration of Mardi Gras. We are going to have a lot of fun learning about people in society as well as learning how to write a retelling. We are going to combine both our language arts and social studies unit. We will read some great books: The Cajun Cornbread Boy, The Runaway Pancake, Clay Boy ,and Gingerbread Baby. We will read these stories and write retellings. Our focus will be the characters, setting and being able to write what happened at the beginning, middle and end. They will also have an opportunity to work on some reading learning targets by drawing their mental images from the stories. We voted today :) And out of Duck, Grace and myself, I won! It was a close race with Grace in 2nd place. They had such fun filling out their voting registration forms! We talked about how important it was to have a picture a signature of their names, just like we do with our licenses. They waited in line (because of course there's always some sort of line when you are voting :) and filled in their ballots. Next they went to Mrs. McNeal's room and place their ballot in the box. After all votes were in, we tallied them up and did some math and found the winner! We also did some graphing and talked about how to read a graph! It was a fun social studies and math lesson! On Monday, we all got our hats (thank you Mrs. Gunnarson!) and bonnets. We got our quills and journals and are ready to record our journey on the Mayflower. Wednesday, we journaled about leaving our families, friends and some of possessions behind. When we chose to leave for new land, we did not get to take everyone with us. Many family members would come later, as well as leaving behind a lot of our clothes, food, toys and other possessions. On Thursday, the Mayflower had taken berth in the water and our journey had begun. We listened to some passengers aboard (Scholastic) and discussed what the conditions were like on the boat. Today we travel on plane, car, train or a cruise ship-all types of transportation that have space and air. Sea sickness took many of us over. Some of us had trouble sleeping in cramped spaces with other people's breathing and snoring keeping us awake as well as the rock of the boat. On Friday, our ship encountered a great storm. We heard first hand from people aboard the ship and heard the crackling of thunder and lightning as well as the breaking of the mast of the ship. There was great talk of sea sickness and fear that our ship might be off course or might not make the journey. After our journaling each day, we drew and colored pictures in a pilgrim story to help complete it as we go along. We started a list of how pilgrim life (the past) is different from our lives today. We will continue to add this list throughout our weeks traveling and learning about pilgrim life. We are having a lot of fun! So far we have 6 reading strategies that we have learned about to help us become better readers! These are great strategies to use with your beginning, intermediate and advanced readers at home! 1. Look at the pictures. 2. Does it make sense? 3. Get your mouth ready. 4. Does it look right? 5. Skip, read, on, go back and fix-REREAD! 6. Does it sound right? When putting all these strategies together, this will help your child become more confident and more accurate in their reading. We will be spending a few weeks on #5 and #6. I use myself as an example often. I read fast, so my brain tells me "stop" you said something wrong-that didn't sound right, so I go back and reread to self correct. I will talk about how when I read with them, that's one of the things I keep track of and look for is to see if they reread to self correct their mistakes. Smart readers listen to that voice in their head that says-wait! that doesn't sound right! Keep practicing and reading nightly! Make sure you record it on your monthly log! I'll enter those into their Pizza Hut Book-it program so they can earn another free pizza at the end of the month! Topic 4 (addition and subtraction facts to 12) was difficult for many students. That being said I am going to spend the next 2 and a half week reteaching those topics with some reinforcement from an excellent program called Fastt Math. It's a computer based program that students do once a day to help them with their facts. It is only 10 minutes of drill and games. It's a great way to help enhance what we are doing in the classroom. It assesses both their keyboard quickness as well as what facts they already know and then creates mini lessons and games for the students!
So the next few weeks we will work on fact families and writing addition and subtraction sentences. We will also work on story problems with these facts to 12. Extra practice at home or playing any math online games that deal with facts will also be helpful. Our next topic deals with addition and subtraction to 20 so I want to make sure that they have a strong understanding of base facts to 12. |
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