Week in Review: January 17-19

What a short week! We only had 3 days, but we still managed to fit in a lot of learning!

In science, we did did an activity called Soil Shakes, where students added water to their soil samples, shook them up, and then watched to see how layers formed. We ended the week with Rock Banging to learn about how rocks are weathered in nature.

In math, we reviewed the different types of quadrilaterals and their attributes, learned about three types of triangles (based on the length of their sides), and began exploring the concept of area.

In language arts, we finished up our One Little Word writing pieces, and have been reviewing capitalization skills. We are still reading biographies and have been spending a lot of time talking about character traits, and why people do what they do.

In other news...Ms. Lampkin from UT is back this semester as a full time student teacher. We are so excited to have her back in the classroom. For the rest of January, she will only be in for partial days as she finishes up a class at UT, but by February, she will be here all day, every day!

Week in Review: January 9-12

We fit a lot of great work into a short 4-day week! In math this week, we worked on two-dimensional shapes in our geometry unit. Students should be able to tell you differences and similarities between rhombuses, parallelograms, rectangles and squares. We will move into area of 2-D shapes next week, followed by 3-dimensional shapes after that.

In science, we have begun our unit on soil. Thanks again for sending in all the samples, we had a great variety to explore. We began by discussing how much soil there is really is on earth, so the next time you eat an apple, ask your student how much of an apple represents the amount of soil we have on earth available for growing plants. We also spent a couple of days examining our soil samples and learning what soil is composed of, which led us to a discussion about how soil is formed. We will continue with soil into next week.

In reading, we have started a unit on biographies and are learning how these non-fiction books help us to learn about the past. Next week, we will focus specifically on how biographies show character development. For writing, we started the semester by writing letters to ourselves describing what we hope to accomplish before the end of third grade. These are on display in our classroom. Next, each student chose "one little word" that they plan to focus on for 2018. Then they wrote paragraphs describing why they chose that word. Next week, we will type these up and get them on display in the common area.

Remember, there is no school on Monday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, so I will look forward to seeing everyone on Tuesday. Enjoy the 3 day weekend!