Classroom Summary for February 11 - 15

(Above: Jacob fulfilling the weekend challenge activity from last week's blog. Thanks to Jacob there is one more fire hydrant accessible in the snow for Burlington's fabulous fire department. Great work Jake! We are so proud of you!)

Here's what we did last week...

In Fundations we continued our work with syllable types be learning the new double vowel syllable. On the 100th day of school we made a goal to list 100 words that contained at least one double vowel syllable. We did so well we went over by 26! Miss Varrell is going to post the list in the hallway for everyone to see.

In math we experimented with place value by working with towers of 2, 5 and 10 (base two, base five and base ten). We took random numbers and working with cubes, we challenged ourselves to find how many towers we could make with and without 'leftovers.' We filled in a chart, or table, to see the patterns in each number. We noticed that when we looked at the patterns in the towers of ten and their leftovers, the written number exactly matched the number of towers and leftovers! For example:

53 = 5 towers of ten, 3 leftovers

71 = 7 towers of ten, 1 leftover   

26 = 2 towers of 10, 6 leftovers

In reading Miss Varrell's reading groups completed their summaries of The Talking Eggs, The Story of Ruby Bridges and Storm in the Night. We also finished our mini-lesson on narrative nonfiction stories by reading the story Mailing May by Michael O. Tunnell. We were amazed by the true story of a five year old girl who was literally sent to visit her grandma via the United States Postal Service! After vacation we'll read from a different genre of literature to expand our horizons.

In writing we continued to work on our paragraph writing skills. We tried writing a persuasive paragraph for the first time. We really enjoyed persuading Miss Varrell that we should be allowed to play in the snow on outdoor recess days in the winter. It got us to think about other things we might want to persuade people about.... Miss Varrell thought we might have some budding lawyers in the making!

In science we finished our unit on weather, the water cycle and clouds. Here we are singing The Water Cycle song!

Next we'll do a short unit on fossils before we head to our next field trip to the Museum of Natural History at Harvard University. What do you already know about fossils?


Vacation Week Challenge:  Design a math game using playing cards or dice. Write down the name of your game, the materials you need to play it, the number of people who can play, the rules of the game and how you keep score. Be prepared to share your game next week!


F.Y.I.

• A big thank you goes out to Mrs. Naddaff for her fabulous craft idea. We appreciate her generosity and time giving us have a the best Valentine's Day ever!
• Our next field trip is coming up in a few weeks. I will be randomly selecting two chaperones from the list of permission/volunteer slips that were handed in in September. Parents who are selected will be notified by Friday, March 1 via email.
• Have a fabulous vacation!