This Week in Review - November 26 - 30

I think the children were happy to come back to school to resume their familiar routines and to see friendly, familiar faces. It is always nice to have some time away from school, and always nice to be back.

In math, we continued having fun with Place Value Yahtzee, and also did some review with subtraction with regrouping. Several children are at that place in their math books. Subtraction across zeros is particularly challenging! We did some Place Value Riddles as a way to build flexible thinking with numbers (425 = 4 hundreds + 2 tens + 5 ones AND 3 hundreds + 12 tens + 5 ones) as we construct and deconstruct numbers. Our place value blocks come in very handy for some of these very tricky puzzles.

Other routines included reciting our weekly poem, Compass, learning our new batch of spelling words, listening to our Special Readers (this week Kalyan and Sophia did a wonderful job!), library time with Sylwia (Lula’s mom and wonderful volunteer), writing memory pages, and so much more! We are enjoying our new chapter book, a great adventure book filled with magic – a little peek into next month’s theme, maybe? – Dominic, by William Steig.

Sylwia is reading about Howard Carter, the man who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun. He was discovered on November 4th, 1922. Many children wanted to check out books related to this subject after hearing about this!

 In Science, we finished our bee research posters and filmed our commercials. Our huge months-long bee conservation project is moving along nicely, and we will share what we have learned at the morning meeting right before Winter Break. We hope you all can bee there!

practicing one last time before being filmed for their commercial!

On Thursday, all first and second graders went birding with new science tools – real binoculars! We are finishing our nature exploration theme this month (although we really explore nature all year ‘round, of course), and wanted one last “hurrah” at County Farm Park to collect data about some of our friends who live there. We have enough binoculars for partners to share, and we tried to find various signs of bird activity on this chilly late-Fall day. We hope to go back to the woods later, next month maybe, to decorate a tree for our feathered bird friends and squirrels (probably with a thermos of hot chocolate).

In the classroom, we have started learning about raptors! Our big Environmental Super Hero project for December is starting next week, as we take the month to prepare for our Birdie Bake Sale. Proceeds will go to sponsor a raptor at the Leslie Science and Nature Center. We kicked things off this week by learning what makes a bird a raptor, and by learning what a raptor eats by dissecting an owl pellet. This was also an important science lesson in making predictions, using science tools, collecting data, and drawing conclusions.