Update for the week of December 1st

Language Arts

This week I read the "Snow Globe Family" by Jane O'Connor to the students.  This is a wonderful story about a little family who lives in a snow globe. They long for a swirling snowstorm—if only someone in the big family would pick up the snow globe and give it a great big shake.  

This book inspired our cute writing project about "Life in a Snow Globe."  The focus for this activity was to continue to add elaborative detail in our writing.

Daily 5

During Daily 5 we continue to focus on our individual reading strategies during Read to Self.  My goal is to conference with all of the students regarding their reading levels and strategies one more time before Christmas break.

As this week was short due to the Friday PD, we took a break from our Words Their Way word sorts.  Instead, our class had the opportunity to do a few different word work activities during the week.  The students especially enjoyed our "Making Words" activity.  The students were giving preselected letters to make 15-20 given words, starting with short words and building up to longer words.  They discovered that changing just one letter or sequence of letters in a word can change its meaning.  At the end of the activity, the students were asked to to use all of their letters for make the "secret" word.  The students quickly figured out that the secret words was "Christmas!"

Math

We continued to focus on the Numbers to 1000 Unit in math by "Skip Counting by 3's and 4's."  The students used number lines and 100's charts to count on and count back by 3's and 4's.  Next week we will focus on "Estimating to 1000."

Social Studies

We were so lucky to have a special guest in this week to teach us a little more about India.  Thank you so much to Mr. R's mom for sharing her wonderful culture and yummy food with us!

The girls really enjoyed having the opportunity to wear a "bindi" on their forehead!

 Art

Here is the finished product when 3R and 3M got together during the "Snow Day" to do a special winter art project.  The students "Van Gogh" style snowmen turned out so cute!