This week we were able to work on many different activities to enrich our learning experience about aquarium life. The students are still asking great questions and are curious to learn more.

Writer’s Workshop has been very active! We are continuing to work with the animals that we researched at the Aquarium. Each student is looking at books and internet resources to find and write down some information about their animals. We will use this research to write our non-fiction writing.

During our Reading Instruction we worked on two different types of speech. Students worked on various noun activities and deepened their understanding of what nouns are. We discussed how nouns are people, places, or things. One of the activities we completed was working on a collage of nouns. We looked through magazines and cut out pictures of nouns. Another group of students worked with a list of words and sorted them into a list of nouns or not-nouns. We grasped this concept pretty quickly so we moved on to working with verbs. The students are working on identifying and brainstorming verbs. Soon we will be working on identifying the nouns and verbs in sentences.

During Science we observed our classroom snail and read a book describing some characteristics of snails. We took turns having a close look at the fish bowl. We were able to look and record details of the snail. We also read a book about saving water. We discussed that most of the Earth is made up mostly of water and that most of that water is saltwater. Conversation followed that led the students to the conclusion that we need to save our water because it is so important to our lives.

In Math Workshop we are setting the foundation for creating surveys. We have been participating in daily surveys, and soon the students will make their own surveys and ask their classmates to answer their survey questions. During our daily surveys we practice using tally marks, counting how many people participated in the survey, and comparing how many people chose each answer.

Please remember that conferences are next week, and we will not have school on Thursday or Friday. Have a great weekend!