Spelling - our words for this week focused on words with -mp and -nt endings.
Reading - In Reader's Workshop this week children worked with their reading buddy to set goals for how many books or pages they could read together. They practiced the best way to read with a partner and revised the read with a partner poem. We also moved on to a mini unit on making connections while reading. This week we focused on Text to Self connections where something in a book reminded the child of a similar experience. We also started to look at Text to Text connections where we are reminded of other books we have read with a similar topic or theme.
Writing - In writing we continued to work on building complete sentences by identifying the naming part (who or what the sentence is about) and the telling part (tells something about the who or what). Children also wrote in their journals about their Halloween experience.
This week we practiced making Fact Families using three given numbers. Students used number cards and connecting cubes to make their own Fact Families. We finished up our unit on Subtraction to 10 with a unit test. Next week we will move on to a unit on Shapes and Patterns.
We continued to explore the design process with a new problem this week. Children had to work in groups to design a 'landing pad' to stop and egg from cracking when dropped onto it. The first day the groups worked on the first two steps in the Design Process...
Find a Problem - Can you make a landing pad that will keep a dropped egg from cracking?
Plan and Build - Thinking about what design to use, how to go about building and testing the design and knowing whether their design was successful.
The second day children worked through the remaining 3 steps of the process..
Test and Improve - testing the design with a hard boiled egg and seeing if they had solved the problem. Two teams needed to go through the redesign process and they were kindly helped by friends who had been successful in building a landing pad that worked well.
Communicate - Students drew and wrote about what happened during the testing and redesigning phase.
For the rest of this term we will provide children with the opportunity to experience and further understand the design process.
The highlight of our week was Tuesday's Halloween celebrations. Each child presented their costume and why they had chosen it. In the afternoon went went Trick or Treating, had a group photo on campus and then came back to school for an afternoon of fun Halloween games.
Enjoy the long weekend,
Larissa