Fairy Tale Fun!

This week during Writer's Workshop, we have been immersed in the world of fairy tales.  Our goal by the end of this narrative unit is to have written an adaptation of a fairy tale and an original fairy tale.  To get our selves ready to write, we have been reading original versions of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Three Billy Goats Gruff and many adaptations of these classic tales.  This week we focused on identifying the  kinds of changes authors make when they adapt a fairy tale and the reasoning behind it.  We found that many authors either change the characters, change the events of the story, or the character's motivation. Next week, your child will choose to write an adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood or of Three Billy Goats Gruff.  Which will your child choose?

In Reader's Workshop, we are continuing our book club groups and investigating characters.  As the children read their books this week, they were looking to see how their characters react to problems in the book and looking at what their reaction tells us about them as a character.  We did this activity first with our read aloud, Because of Winn Dixie. We observed that Opal, the main character, has had a lot of challenges so far in the book.  Here mom is gone; she is new in town; she does not have any friends; and some boys tease her.  We noticed from her reactions that she is a strong character with a lot of courage!  What has your child learned about the character is her or her book club book?  We also began to study the secondary characters in a story and are looking at how those characters help the main character in the book.

Multiplication and division are still are main focus in math this month; however, this week we focused on solving story problems using multiplication and division. The children worked on these grouping and sharing problems independently in their math journals and then we discussed their variety of strategies, with an emphasis on building an array and identifying its dimensions. For example, one problem was "Rosa bought 32 marbles at the game shop. The marbles came in bags of 8.  How many bags of marbles did she buy?". Ask your child how he or she solved that problem.  Can he or she model it with a labeled array?

Lastly, the weather has been warmer this week, but I am sure it will still fluctuate as we are only in the beginning of March. Please make sure that your child comes to school with appropriate outdoor clothing every day.  Boots are a must as the playground has become extremely muddy with this warmer weather.  Thank you!