Learning How to Add--The Beginning

We're on our way to learning how to add, and even learn some addition facts by heart.  One of the ways we can start to understand addition is to decompose numbers.  What's that you might ask?  Take a look:

10 is 5 and 5, and 5 is 3 and 2. What other combinations can your child come up with?

Learning about Money, Part 1

In math, we're learning about money!  We've been focusing on the penny and the nickel so far. We need to learn to identify coins and their values.  Here are some of us looking for pennies and nickels:

Then we made a thinking map to compare pennies and nickels.  It's convenient that one of our recent vocabulary words is compare:

When checking out at the store, ask your child if he or she can identify the coins you may get back from a purchase.  In addition, see if your child can tell you the value of the coins.  

Up next:  the dime and quarter.

Making Connections with Books

One of our goals is making connections to the text while reading.  One of the ways we can make connections is to think about how books remind us of other books.  Boy have we been busy with this!

First, we read several books on winter and hibernation:

Then we compared the two.  It was a great way to review or retell what we have read in the books.  Here is a chart we made to show our thinking and connections:

We compared two fictional books as well.  

These books were written by the same author and used the same characters.  See how we found the books to be similar:

The next time when you and your child read together, ask you child what connections he or she can make to the book.  

Describing Night Using the Five Senses

During our shared reading time, we read books about night.  Our focus was to pay attention to the way the author described night.  Here are the books we read:

We paid close attention to how the author used sensory details to describe night.  Here is a chart we made:

Then we wrote sentences about night using our five senses:

We made a nighttime picture to go along with it:

What words come to mind when you think of night?

What Does Writing Look Like in Our Classroom?

Take a peek:

Typically during our journal time, writers are working independently on their writing goals.  Students' goals may be to write the whole time, write more than two sentences, or write the sounds they hear in words. Writing in journals is a favorite activity!  Can you tell?