Winter Ways

This month in Hands on Nature the focus was on "Winter Ways": how animals and plants react and change with winter weather. Throughout the lesson we learned about how some animals migrate, hibernate, stay active, or become dormant.  Can your child give you an example of an animal that migrates and one that hibernates?

In math, we finished Unit 3 by learning the standard algorithm for subtraction (also called the regrouping method.  Although students are not expected to master this algorithm until fourth grade, we introduced this as one way the children can subtract multi-digit numbers.  We compared this to other strategies we have used (decomposing, number lines) and determined which strategies work best for certain problems.  Next week, we will start a new math unit.  In this math unit, we will explore time, measurement (volume), and fractions.

During theme, we began studying weather.  We first focused on weather vocabulary and weather tools, such as temperature and thermometer.  Each day for the next two weeks we will be making temperature observations and collecting data about the high temperature from three locations around the world:  Shelburne, Vermont, Castries, Saint Lucia, and Cairo, Egypt.  After collecting the data, we graph this data and make some observations about temperature in different climates.  Next week, we will be learning about the different climate zones in the world.

In Writer's Workshop, we continued to work on writing chapters for our non fiction books.  This week we learned about writing different types of chapters: descriptive chapters, sequence chapters, and comparison chapters.  The children learned how to use several graphic organizers and then write from the graphic organizers.  In Reader's Workshop, we continued reading more non fiction and find the main idea and details of the text.  This week we learned that readers of non fiction will become experts and are able to teach about an what they read.  If your child is reading non fiction at home, see if he or she can teach about that topic!

In Miss Niles' class, Jeff Badillo, our technology educator, has joined us once a week to teach us about Google Docs.  With Jeff, the students learned how to log in to their Google accounts, how to create a new writing document, and how to share it with others.  This week the children had the opportunity to do some creative writing on the laptops and shared their work with me to review.  Your children can access this at home so feel free to ask them to show you how to get into their Google Docs!

Have a great weekend!