Happy April!

April has been a beautiful month so far.  Our class meteorologist has reported sunny skies every April day this week.  The sun and warmer temperatures have melted some of the snow on our playground, meaning that snow pants are no longer needed on most areas of the playground!!  This saves us quite a few minutes each time we get ready to go outside. 

This week during Reading we:

• found the word "for" in a new poem and practiced reading, spelling, and writing it.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• played "Guess the Covered Word," a reading game that helps us make sure what we think a word could be looks right.  I cover a word in a sentence, read up to the covered word, and then ask the children to think of words that would make sense.  We list all the ideas that would make sense, then slowly uncover the word, eliminating any words that don't look right until we have the correct word.  Children LOVE this reading game, and it would be a great one to play at home!
• added "he" to our word wall.
• read with our first grade reading buddies!
• learned about the "it" word family and listed words (real and nonsense) that belong to this family.  Learning about word families helps children look for chunks they know when they come to a new word.

This week during Writing we published one of our all-about books.  Children chose their favorite all-about book, and worked to make it better by adding parts they were missing/more information.  We edited our books for correct spelling of word wall words, finger spaces, punctuation, and capital letters.  I typed the books, printed and bound them, and on Friday, the children began illustrating their very own printed books!  We will finish our illustrations next week.

This week during Math we:

• learned about counting as a way to measure how long it takes someone to do something, like crossing a room.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• played The Raft Game to help us practice trading.
• learned about fact families.  We all created paper ladybugs and used these to demonstrate our understanding of fact families.  What a fun learning activity this was!
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• created our own survey questions, conducted our surveys, then created a bar graph to represent our results.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Next week, Alden's mom, Mrs. Robbins, will teach us about the process of making maple syrup.  How exciting!

Have a nice weekend,
Katie