We have been working hard to show our mathematical thinking when solving story problems.  We are trying to really understand what the question is asking and to answer that question.  
We have learned about 2 types of problems- "put together" problems and "take apart" problems.  In a put together problem we are told the parts, but we need to find out the total or whole.  In a take apart problem we are given the total or whole and we need to find the parts. This is a hard concept which takes a ton practice to master.  We will continue to practice in the third trimester and we will throw subtraction into the mix!😎

This is a "put together" problem.  4 blue kites and 3 red kites make 7 kites in all. 

This is a "take apart" problem.  We know there are 6 kites in all, but how many are blue and how many are red?

We learned so much about elephants! We read tons of nonfiction and charted our new learning.  We also read "Horton Hears a Who".  Horton is an elephant with a big heart who stands up for his little friends. We read this in honor of 
Dr. Seuss's birthday on March 2nd. We are learning the difference between fiction and nonfiction and the features of nonfiction and story elements of fiction.

Horton was helpful to his Who friends.  We wrote about being helpful. 

We started with charting our schema. Then we charted our new learning about elephants. We learned some amazing facts! 

Did you know that there are two kinds of elephants? Yup! African and Asian. 

Our elephant fact book. 

Each flap opens up!

We learned about "inferring". That's when you figure things out!

We learned about text features of nonfiction.  One is labels. The other is a caption- a little extra information that goes with the picture. 

First we discussed and wrote about our schema , then after reading we wrote a new fact that we learned. 

 We celebrated Valentine's Day this week! We read Love Monster and did lots of activities to learn about story elements.  
 

 

 

                                                               

         We finished our Science Unit on wood!  
We studied this as part of our Matter and Materials Kit. We had a lot of fun as we made predictions and tested out our claims using evidence from our observations and trials.  We are learning to write a conclusion using words from the focus question.  
        The next part of this kit is all about paper.  

We are continuing to enjoy our science unit on Matter.  We talked about being "engineers". Engineers make and observe mixtures. We continued to explore wood.  We looked at sawdust and wood shavings and compared them. Then we made mixture by mixing them together.  We found that the sawdust was hard to see. Then we took it a step further and added the mixture to water and stirred it up.  We talked about how the wood was "waterlogged", which means very soggy.  Then I asked how we could get our wood back! We had some really great ideas.  Devin thought we could use our hand to keep the sawdust from coming through, just the water would. Then we used a screen to strain our wood mixture.  We found that the water was cloudy and Liam saw that it was an orange color.  So what is making the water that way? We had great discussions and finally we decided that it must be from the wood! We decided to try to strain the water even more by using a paper towel inside the screen.  When we did that we could see the sawdust left behind! Boy, Scientist have to think hard! 

              

      

Julian is writing his conclusion. 

We are working hard in science! At the start of each lesson we ask a "focus question".  This drives our inquiry.  We then test things out and find our "conclusion".  We are learning to use words from the question in our conclusion. In this lesson the focus question is: How can you change the shape of wood? We concluded that "You can use sand paper to change the shape of wood."  We smoothed out edges, we rounded out the sides, we had so much fun learning about science by diving in and testing our predictions!

Mila is writing her conclusion. 

Kai is smoothing out the sides. 

Landon is using trial and error to see how he can change the shape of his block of wood. 

Snow 
   Much
      Fun!