Monday, February 20, 2012

Last Tuesday was a lovely day - it was Valentine's day! The students opened their Valentine bags after lunch. They were very excited and loved opening their cards. What fun it was to see them thanking each other for their cards. The Valentine party was a big success. Thank you to all of our faithful volunteers for helping at each station. Also, thank you to everyone that sent in the party donations. The students had an enjoyable time.

Last week, we studied about rocks. We discussed the properties of rocks; size, color, texture and luster. We sorted rocks by size and color. We used hand lenses to observe the rocks and recorded our observations. We also found out that not all rocks will sink in water! Pumice will float. We noticed that some rocks change colors if they got wet. As we listened to the story, The Crow and the Pitcher, we noticed that rocks take up space. We added rocks to a container of water to see that the water level would rise. 

Units of study for the next couple of weeks:

Social Studies: Being Patriot in My Community- Students will establish the foundation for responsible citizenship by examining how holidays, historical figures, symbols and customs represent American beliefs and principles and contribute to our national identity.

Math: Patterns- Students will use patterns to identify relationships and make predictions. They will use patterns of sounds, physical movement, and concrete objects. Students begin to use what they learned in earlier units and extend learning by exploring patterns such as growing patterns, repeating patterns, and geometric patterns

Reading:

• discuss the purposes for reading and listening to various texts (e.g., to become involved in real and imagined events, settings, actions, and to enjoy language);
• ask and respond to questions about text
• monitor and adjust comprehension (e.g., using background knowledge, creating sensory images, re­reading a portion aloud)
• make inferences based on the cover, title, illustrations, and plot
• retell or act out important events in stories
• make connections to own experiences, to ideas in other texts, and to the larger community and discuss textual evidence.  

Writing:

• dictate or write sentences to tell a story and put the sentences in chronological sequence
• Write clearly and coherently using standard writing conventions
•     Use descriptive words
• use complete simple sentences
• capitalize the first letter in a sentence and use punctuation at the end of the sentence