Ants, Ants, Ants!

This week we finished Unit 1 in Math.  We joined Miss Niles' class on Tuesday to compare and contrast our Churn Dash Quilt with hers.  We created a Venn Diagram to compare the two.  This led to an interesting discussion about what a square is.  On Wednesday, Mr. Feeley (Mrs. KillKelley's instructor from the Best Practices Math Class) joined our class to teach us about growing patterns.  We learned that we can use the arrangement number in a pattern to help us determine what the pattern will look like.  I was truly amazed by the math understanding of growing patterns my friends had at the end of this lesson.  Today we began Unit 2-"Hungry Ants".  We kicked off the unit by reading "One Hundred Hungry Ants" and created different arrangements of ants.  This is an integrated unit, so we will be spending quite a bit of time learning about ants.  This unit will also connect to our Readers and Writers non-fiction unit we will be working on for the months of October and November.

This week we shared our Bink and Gollie books and talked a lot about ways to fancy up our writing during Writers Workshop. Next week we will talk about the writing process which will include conferring, editing and publishing.  During Readers Workshop we continued to talk about what good readers do and spent time practicing making text to text, text to self, and text to world connections.  We also learned about how good readers ask questions when they read, and spent some time practicing that during this time.  At this time we are using post-it notes to write down our connections and questions while we read.  We have also been enjoying Guided Reading Groups during this time.  We took our Unit 2 Test in Fundations today and will begin Unit 3 on Monday.  I was wowed by how well everyone did on their Unit 2 Test!

This was our last week for our first social studies/science rotation.  Next week Mrs. Nakhleh and I will switch groups and begin a new unit.  Wednesday will be our next Hands On Nature.  Please make sure your child is dressed for the outdoors on Wednesday as we will probably be doing some of our learning outdoors and it is starting to get chilly this time of year. 

 Have a terrific weekend!