February 3, 2012

   Greetings families and friends! Here is the latest scoop about our week at school. Literacy

    We read the last story in unit 3 this week entitled Animal Camouflage, by Janet McDonnell. This non-fiction selection is filled with wonderful photographs and information about animals in the wild and how they blend into their surroundings.     We also worked on reading and writing words with prefixes and suffixes and studied their meanings. Examples are: mislead, unaware, and doubtful.                    We played a Jeopardy game to test us on the spelling, vocabulary, grammar, and story comprehension lessons for unit 3 in Open Court today!

Math

    We are now also working in a new chapter in Think Math! The focus of this chapter is “strategies to build addition and subtraction fluency”. In other words, we are learning strategies to help us with addition and subtraction facts. Last week we practiced writing equations that were part of a fact family. For example: 5+7=12, 7+5=12, 12-5=7, 12- 7=5, 5=12-7, 12=7+5, 7=12-5.

   This week, we learned strategies to help us solve some of the addition and subtraction automatically. For example: 35+9= __ is solved like this… 35+10=45-1=44.

Theme

     Last week our science lessons focused on the animals of the tropical rain forests. We learned about the different layers of the rain forest (the forest floor, the understory, and the canopy). We also learned about amazing animals like the basilisk lizard that can run on water, the beautiful jaguar, the tapir, and the three-toed sloth.

   This week we studied animals of the polar regions and their amazing adaptations. Did you know that polar bears have black skin? Why would that be an important adaptation? We also learned about some of the different types of penguins and made our own mini penguin book.

Other News

Here is our Friday Riddle: What do you call Frosty the Snowman in May?               

    Reminder: There will be an early dismissal on Wednesday, February 8 (12:00).          

                                 Have a wonderful weekend!