Habits of Mind: Questioning

Personalize your own slideshow On Tuesday we had a special visitor come to our classroom. Her name is Heather Baron and she is working with our school on Differentiated Instruction. She came to our team this week to teach the children one of the 16 Habits of Mind. We looked at the importance of questioning when learning. We talked about our visit from Tao last week and brainstormed questions that we might want to ask her using question starters such as I wonder why...., I wonder if...., I wonder how..... They came up with these in groups of 4 & 5 and then picked one burning question to share with the group. They came up with some very thought provoking questions about what Tao had shared. We followed up with this by writing thank you letters to Tao and asking her our questions in those letters.  We hope to get answers from Tao next week. This week in Science and Social Studies we continued to learn about "Animals" and "Long Ago". In Mrs. Nakhleh's classroom they learned about Colonial homes and about schools from long ago. They made Keeping room dioramas and then horn books. Next week they will look at Colonial time jobs. In Mrs. KillKelley's room we learned about animal adaptations.  Next week we will begin our Endangered Species projects.  Each student will choose an endanagered species in the United States to learn about and create a plan to save it from extinction.  We continued to explore relationships between various 2 and 3 dimensional shapes in Math this week.  We learned new work station games that support our learning for this unit.  Our focus for Writer's Workshop continues to be on editing our work.  Our Readers Workshop has focused on reading strategies.  We will finish Unit 7 and our learning about open syllables in Fundations next week. Please have your child return this week's homework and Friday Folder on Thursday of this coming week as there will be no school on Friday.  There will be no homework over the holiday break. Have a great weekend!