Ask me about thursday, march 17, 2022

What a busy week we've had so far!  We have worked with silent e words that have the long vowel sound in the middle.  These words are in many of the books they have been reading, so we are working hard to look through the whole word to see if it ends with a silent e.  So many of the children are getting stuck because they are trying to sound out or tap out every sound, so their eyes are going across the word letter by letter.  With more experience and practice, they will be better at scanning the whole word to see if they already know it, which is important because they are sounding out red words that they already know so it slows them down, or it's a word that ends with a silent e so they need to use the long sound for the vowel most likely.  So this is again something they will learn with more experience and practice.  
We listened to a story about Harriet Tubman as part of our Women's History Month books.  We read Before She Was Harriet, by Lesa Cline-Ransome.  This book is beautifully illustrated by James E. Ransome and is written in verse.  The book chronicles Harriet's life in reverse, and we learn about the other names Harriet was known by and the causes and work she did to lead so many to freedom.  This beautiful book is one I hope the children again as they grow because there is so much to learn about this amazing woman.
We worked with the letter v this week.  We read Ugly Vegetables, by Grace Lin.  This story is about a young girl who is embarrassed because her mother plants Asian vegetables when all her neighbors are planting beautiful flower gardens.  But when the vegetables are picked and made into soup, her neighbors show up at the door to get a taste of the wonderful soup.  Today we read a story called Grandma Lena's Big Ol' Turnip, by Denia Hester.  I chose this book because it's a Russian folktale, The Turnip, that is retold with a twist.  This time it is set in the South with an African American family who also grow an enormous turnip.  We listened for a message in the story since that is what we are working on in our Benchmark lessons too.  The children also made a text-to-text connection to the Ugly Vegetables story since both had soup and communities coming together and celebrating food.
In science we continue to work with motion and forces.  We used balls to see how more and less force effects the motion and how we can change the path and even stop the path with different obstacles.  
In math we are continuing to work with story problems, addition and subtraction, and writing number sentences to go with sets of objects that are combined.  I will be reteaching this with more manipulatives because the children are having a difficult time writing the equations properly.  Some are just plugging the numbers in anywhere and not thinking about what makes sense.  We want to be sure they have that strong understanding of what the equations mean before rushing to just learn addition and subtraction facts.  
We are working with opposites, in fact I am hoping to record the children reading a two-part poem with opposites tomorrow and posting it.  I was so impressed with how well they picked up on how to read a two-part poem! 

Of course we are still checking in on the eagles, and in just a week, pipping should begin for DC8.  Today we saw a fish on the nest that Lotus brought back, and we saw how she was being a great "mombrella" for her two eggs in all the rain today.  It seems like DC got a little more steady rain than we did!

Now for what I know all of you are waiting for, the video I promised to post yesterday but didn't!  We read The Three Little Pigs in Benchmark, and had a few minutes before our special, so we watched this old Silly Symphony from Disney.  I know some of you already found it on your own, but for those of you anxious to see it, here it is!
Enjoy and have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe