I hope everyone enjoyed their extra long weekend last week! It was a short week back with the kids but we still managed to get in a lot of learning. We have been focusing our reading lessons on two main character concepts—character feelings and character problems. The kids have been learning how to notice and expect these story elements and then to give evidence about their thinking from the text. For example, the problem in Too Many Tamales is Maria thinks she’s lost mom’s ring because she got it stuck in the masa, so she screams “the ring” and makes her cousins eat all the tamales. They have been getting better and better explaining heir reading thinking!
In writing we worked on fine tuning our realistic fiction writing by revising. We learned that revising is adding to, moving, or removing parts of our stories. Students got to work with partners and by themselves using a checklist to revise their stories.
In math we worked on word problems using two-digit numbers and learned one more strategy for adding two digit numbers—compensation. Compensation is when mathematicians think flexibly about numbers to turn a harder problem to solve like 29+25 into a simpler problem like 30+24.
We ended our week with an amazing assembly arranged by the PTO. It was a marionette puppet show of an old Chinese folktale. We truly enjoyed the performance and had lots of questions about how it all worked. We learned a lot!

We had a great Valentine’s Day in Room 30 today! The kids were so excited to put the finishing touches on their card holders and pass out their valentines. We also did some valentines word problems, valentines writing to make cards for our families, and valentines buddy word work. It was a fun filled day.

We celebrated the 100th Day of School on Friday. The kids we very excited to make this milestone and enjoyed some 100th day challenges to show off all their amazing learning this year! We challenged ourselves to write 100 words in word work, to come up with 100 ways to make 100 in math, and read a fun 100th Day of School book. It was a fun day and got us excited for our last 82 days! 😊. We’re also looking forward to reaching our goal of 100 Acts of Kindness by Valentines Day. Right now we’re up to 37 acts of kindness. Let’s keep going!

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Working on our 100th day challenges!

Yesterday we began using a new app on the iPads called Epic. Some of the kids were familiar with the program, but many were not. The app gives us access to thousands of age appropriate books at the children’s level. The kids can explore their own reading interests, or I can also assign books for the kids to read on a specific topic. Yesterday the kids read and listened to a text that supports our Project Lead the Way unit on States of Matter. The kids are always very excited when the iPads come out and they learned a lot! Ask your child what is matter and what are the three states of matter we’ve learned about.