News for September 30

News for September 30

What a week! Room 204 is now a combined grade classroom with both grade 2 and grade 3 students. We were sad to say good bye to ten students as they went to their new classrooms, but we were happy to welcome ten new students to our class. From grade 3 gifted screening testing, to school pictures, to a real fire alarm evacuation, it was a very eventful week.

The grade 3 gifted screening testing was done this week each day, for three days this week. The whole class participated in learning how to do the practice tests in the morning. Then in the afternoon, the grade 3 students went to Mr. Hunter's class for two periods and the grade 2's came to our class. We creating paintings, made paper toys and even watched some Pingu cartoons!

In science, the children used what they learned about researching squirrels last week, to help them begin animal research projects of their own. The children each picked an animal that they were interested in. We organized the projects so that every student is researching a different animal. That way, when the projects are finished, not only will each child be an expert on one animal but also, as a class we will learn about 20 different animals! At the end of the week, the class began to learn about how scientists classify or sort animals into different categories (birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, mammals). 

The children learned how to use stencils. They used alphabet stencils to put a easy-to-read title on the poster papers for their animal research projects.

The class reviewed the 17 word wall (spelling) words that we have learned so far, so that the new students could catch up. Recall it is expected that the students remember how to spell these word wall words....for the rest of their lives! :-)

In math, the class reviewed patterns in the 100 chart and skip counting forwards and backwards. The students taught the new members of our class how to play the math game "Race to 100" (addition) and "Race to 0" (subtraction) but this time the children used two dice. The children also worked on completing mini-books of math questions reviewing number sense concepts.

The math challenge this week had the student partners using their "two brains" to solve a challenging math word problem. It was great to see the children use the strategy of drawing a picture to help understand what the problem requires them to find. There were many different approaches to solving the problem and all of them got the correct or close-to-correct answer.

Books read aloud this week:

Thing Thing by Carey Fagan

More Life Size Zoo by Teruyuki Komiya

Life Size Farm by Teruyuki Komiya

The World That Loved Books by Stephen Parlato

Underwater Dogs by Seth Castel