Penguins Penguins!

You have probably heard all about our week with our class visitor, an emperor penguin.  He arrived in our classroom in a box from Antarctica.  We spent the week learning all about our penguin and his needs to survive here at Washington school.  We even made a plan as to how we would create a room with all of its needs if we were to keep our penguin here at school.  In the end, we decided that it would be best to send our penguin home to his natural habitat, Antarctica.  It was much fun for the kids to learn all about penguins and integrate penguin activities throughout our day of reading, writing, and math.

Mrs. Block discusses the needs of our penguin with the students.

What will we do with this penguin!?

Our penguin arrived!

This week has been a busy one.  Here's our quick recap:

Reading:  This week we have been reading an African Folk Tale called Too Much Talk.  It was fun to practice reading it with expression in our voices for the different characters that spoke in the story.  We talked this week too about asking the questions who, what, and where?? 
WHO is the main character in the story?
WHAT are they doing in the story?
WHERE are they in the story?
We had the chance to go to the computer lab this week and get on RAZkids.com.  If you have access to the internet at home, this is a great resource to use to have your child practice their on-level reading.  Please let me know if you need your child's login information sent home again.  We practiced "visualizing" when we heard a poem called "The Balloon Man".  The kids came up with some great pictures of their visualizations.

Math:  In math this week, we have worked a lot on number stories.  In those stories we've discussed and compared amounts, figuring out who has more and how much more each time.  We learned that this is the DIFFERENCE between the numbers.  We're also comparing numbers using our symbols >,<,=. 
We continue to practice our math facts each day.  This week each day we also practiced putting data into bar graphs and discussing the information we found in the completed graphs.

Language Arts:  We completed another big writing activity this week.  We wrote a fact piece about penguins.  The kids made an idea web and listed 6 facts they learned about penguins.  We came up with a topic sentence, wrote the six facts, and ended our story with a concluding sentence.  They did wonderful writing!!  We are really starting to remember those capitals at the beginning of sentences and periods at the end. 

I really enjoyed meeting with all of you last week during conferences.  It's so nice to share how well your children are doing and all the wonderful gains they are making.  Thanks for all the support at home!

Mrs. Halon