Happy Hanukkah!

This week the students completed their first Project Based Learning unit by presenting their art and technology pieces. All of the projects were centered around their essential question: How can we be good citizens? The students made displays and videos about being respectful, recycling, giving, helping others, and more. They presented their pieces to the third and first graders. I was so impressed by their hard work and the knowledge they shared during their presentations! Mrs. Gamlin, Mrs. Lerner, and Mrs. Inna guided and encouraged the students through the development of these projects!

Reading

This week the students read a nonfiction piece called Animals Building Homes. We are going to continue using this story next week to study text features like headings, pictures, captions, charts, and graphs. The students learned when to add “s” to the end of a noun to make it plural and when to add “es.” We played a fun relay race where the students had to sort words by the “s” or “es” ending. The students know that you add “s” to make a word plural, unless it ends in the letters “ch”, “sh”, “s”, “x”, or “z”. We also began studying prefixes and the students were introduced to the prefixes “un” (meaning not or the opposite) and “re” (meaning again.) The students learned that a prefix is not a word on its own, but when you add it to the beginning of a base or root word it changes that word’s meaning, like with unreal and reread. We will continue to review these important skills next week.

Below, students are using a nonfiction text to take notes and create 5 sentence paragraphs on one big idea.

Writing

The students worked on creating engaging beginnings or leads for their stories. We learned that beginning a story with, “One time I…” is not the best way to grab your readers’ attention! The students are now beginning their pieces with dialogue, sounds, and creative details! The students also began working to create strong endings and we will continue this next week.

Spelling

This week the students worked on words that contain vowel pairs where the first vowel makes a long sound and the second vowel is silent. You find this pattern in words like beach, goat, and rain. We called this pattern, “When two vowels go walking, the first vowel does the talking.” The students went on a word hunt and found many examples of these words all over our classroom!

Here are some of the students using our classroom to find examples of our spelling pattern.

Math

This week the students worked on estimating the cost of items by rounding up or down to the closest ten. For example, if bananas cost $2.99 for a bunch, that is about $3.00 or if a sandwich is $4.67 that is about $4.70. We learned that we can use quick estimations to check our work. If your estimation is about $5.00 and your exact total comes out to be $10.99 then you know you have done something wrong and you need to rework the problem! We also practiced adding and subtracting two digit numbers. Next week we will work on measuring the length of items using inches and feet.

Here are the students playing an addition and subtraction game. It is amazing to watch how fast their brains work!

I hope everyone has a wonderful Hanukkah! Tomorrow we will have a fabulous Hanukkah celebration!