Ask Me About Monday, May 5, 2015

Today we started a unit of study about folktales.  In this mini-unit, we will read many folktales.  We started with a fairytale that not as many children are familiar with called The Princess and the Pea.  We read an African version of the story by Rachel Isodora.  Ask me to tell you the story of the Princess and the Pea with my story map. 
We worked more with math story problems.  We focused on story problems that have more than one answer, so a question might say: Max has six apples.  Some of the apples are red, some are yellow.  How many of each color could Max have?  Students can use pictures or manipulatives to find the answer.  We are also working a lot with ten.  This number is very important to a strong foundation in number sense, so we want children to be able to know different ways to make ten without manipulatives, using fingers, or drawing a picture.  These combinations need to be known fluently, so we will be working more with ten during our math station time. 
In Social Studies we are working on our family culture.  We are talking about food this week.  We started our week by looking at food families around the world buy for a week.  It was really interesting to see the children study the pictures and compare what families eat in different places in the world.  We talked about why families make the food choices they do.  Everyone was hungry by the end of this lesson, so next time we talk food, it will be right before lunch instead of first thing in the morning!  Here are a few of the pictures we compared:

Have a nice evening!
Juliet