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We read a story called Dear Mr. Blueberry where a girl writes letters to her teacher about an imaginary whale that lives in her pond. Everyone made a post card about an imaginary animal living at their house.
We learned about the first 6 (out of 12) common addition and subtraction situations. We've been practicing how to solve problems with the "unknown" in all positions of the equation.
We are excited to have some new technology in our classroom. All teachers have been provided with an iPad, a stand (the red thing in the picture) and Apple TV so that we can use our iPads as document cameras or project aps that are on our iPads. This makes it really easy for students to come up and show their work to the class. They just put their paper under the iPad and a picture is projected for everyone to see!
We've learned a lot about a reading strategy called QAR (question-answer-relationship) lately. QAR helps us understand that there are four kinds of questions about books: "Right There" questions, "Think and Search" questions, "Author and Me" questions, and "On My Own" questions. To answer some of these questions we need to look for clues in the book. For others we use more of our own ideas. The literacy coach at our school has been helping us with this.
We are wrapping up a unit about writing poetry. We have learned a lot about poetic devices, or as we have been saying, "tools that poets use." Our next writing unit will be writing about our opinions.
We have collected all of our poetry into a book. To decorate our covers we tried some chromatography (separating ink colors on filter paper). We can't wait to bring our books home and share them with you.