Classroom Summary for January 27 - 31

Here's what we did this week...

In Fundations we completed our seventh unit of study on the open syllable type and the suffixes: -y, -ly, and -ty. We reviewed the sounds that vowel y makes (long e, long i) and practiced spelling words with the three new suffixes and the open syllable type. Here are some examples of words that contain an open syllable:

     menu               lobby                  remote  

        
During our literacy block we continued to read about cultures from other countries and took notes on topics that interested us: food, sports, famous people, animals, landmarks, landforms and bodies of water, arts and crafts, maps and flags, and holidays and festivals. As we took notes in these categories, we began to add 'juicy' words to our writing so that our sentences would be more persuasive when we begin to draft our culture projects.  We are learning to use Tables of Contents, Indexes (Indices), captions, photographs and headings to help us find what we want to write about.

We also began using a graphic organizer called a web to create the rough draft of a paragraph.  A sample went home on Monday with the homework packet to demonstrate the use of the web and how it will help develop a topic that we want to write about. We will use the web and other graphic organizers for writing activities throughout the year. Below are some pictures of our pre-writing/brainstorming work:

On Monday and Tuesday, Mr. Callahan came in during our literacy time to teach us how to use the Book Creator app on the iPads. We will use Book Creator to create publish our independent projects. Next week we will learn how to locate pictures online and insert them into our books!

In social studies we continued working on our Journey Around the World packets. We are becoming professional map key readers! So far we have looked for and found the seven continents, borders between countries, oceans, rivers, and mountain ranges. We love looking through the atlases and using the globes and giant maps we have in the classroom to find these wonderful places all over the world!

In math, we continued to work with subtraction of two-digit numbers. First, we began looking at problems to identify whether or not we needed to regroup (e.g. 'borrow', to those of us born before 1995). Next, we advanced to subtracting one digit numbers only. Then we worked our way up to subtracting double digit numbers and by the end of the week we were able to draw our problems on a place value mat or a number line AND write a story problem to match. We even learned how to use the inverse operation (addition) to check our work! Check out our teaching skills here:

As it was the last Friday of the month, we buddied up with Mrs.Visocchi's fourth graders again to do share reading and mapping skills. Fourth grade is currently doing research on regions of the United States. Mrs.Visocchi's class taught us about the northeast region states and showed us how to find capital cities, borders, major rivers, lakes and land forms on the different state maps. Here we are working together:

Weekend Challenge Activity:  Go on a Vitamin D Scavenger Hunt! Vitamin D is a very important part of our diet (what we eat), especially at times of the year when we can't be outside in the sunlight as much as we need to be. This weekend, ask a parent if you can look at the nutrition labels for 10 different food items that you have in your refrigerator or cabinet. (If there is a food that doesn't have a nutrition label on it, ask your parent if you can use the computer to look it up.) Find out which of the ten items has the most Vitamin D. Bring in a list of your top five items on Monday and we'll see which foods are good choices for keeping up our Vitamin D in the winter!