February 22nd- 26th

I don’t want to beat around the bush because this class is the best thing since sliced bread!  Even though it rained cats and dogs this week, the students didn’t cry over split milk! We felt like our learning was a piece of cake and all of the students were totally on the ball! This week we studied idioms, phrases that don’t mean exactly what they say. We learned that to figure out the idioms we read or hear, we have to think about what is happening when the idiom is used. Here are some of the idioms the students came up with:

Hold your horses!
Knock it off.
Hit the lights.
Cat got your tongue?

We are going to continue listening for idioms and hunting for them in our books!

Reading
This week the students read a biography on Wolfgang Mozart and created “biography brochures” that shared information about Mozart’s childhood, education, and impact on the world! The students learned that a biography gives nonfiction information about a person’s life. We also continued to study the four types of sentences (statements, commands, questions, and exclamations.) Next week, the students will read the nonfiction essay Schools Around the World and poems about schools. We will study the author’s purpose for writing and learn how to analyze and evaluate text. The students will begin learning the rules for using quotation marks to show dialogue in a story.

Vocabulary
Our vocab words are becoming more challenging! See if you can work them into your discussions at home. The more the your children hear the words the better they understand them. Next week’s words: Culture, community, language, transportation, subjects, lessons, special, and wear.

Spelling
This week the students studied words that begin with the silent letters “k” or “w.” We learned some cool new words this week like wren, knead, kneel, knapsack, and wring! Next week, the students will learn about words the end in “ight” and “ow”, like bright and swallow.

Math
This week the students worked on halving and doubling numbers. We also learned about weight in pounds and ounces. We weighed things around our classroom and thought about the weight of things like a piece of paper, an elephant, or a car! We practiced using rulers and measuring tape to find measurements in centimeters and inches. The students often need reminders to start their ruler at zero. We began collecting data about how far we can jump and the width of our arm spans.  We will use this data to create graphs and find the median (middle), mode (most popular number), and range (maximum minus the minimum.)

Here are are measuring our arm spans!