We began the week learning about the Chinese New Year.  We learned that this is the year of the dragon.  We really hope the dragon brings us good luck this year!

In order to improve our writing we are looking at real authors and trying to get inspired! This week we started reading books by Mem Fox. We read some of her books and tried to figure out what she does as a writer then we tried some of her techniques in our own work! We began adding our books into our classroom library. They are so much fun to read!!

In reading, we took all the parts of the story star and added them to a story hand.  When we are retelling a story we can think about the hand to help us remember all the parts.

We got letters from our pen pals this week.  We were so excited to read them and to write them back! Some students even made plans to meet their pen pals out on the playground. 

We began a new unit in math this week. This unit focuses on graphing and interpreting data. We learned that picture graphs are a great way to make quick comparisons. We learned that picture graphs can compare more than just two things. After studying some graphs that had multiple objects we got to make our own! First we thought of a title for our graph then we collected our data by asking our classmates to answer our survey questions. Finally, we graphed our data and wrote "more" and "fewer" sentences about what we found out.

This week we learned our 25th Hunk and Chunk!! Ask us to sing the song for you, see if we can remember all 25!

Have a great week!
Mrs. Donohue

This week we had our classroom spelling bee. The winner was River.  Congratulations River!!!

In reading we continued to talk about the sequence of events.  We read, "If you Take a Mouse to the Movies" to discuss the events in the order they occured. This was a story we were all familiar with.  We then read "Peanut Butter and Jelly." We used the words "First, Next, Then, and Last" to help identify the events.

We created a list of words that came to our mind when we thought of the word winter.  We used these words to create Winter Bingo.  The words were a great inspiration to our winter stories. 

We ended the week with a surprise visit from Mr. Donohue.  He even read some books for us!

This week was so busy I completely forgot to take any pictures!!

In reading this week we began learning about sequencing the major events of a story.  We learned that the words "Beginning, Middle, and End" will help us with this.  It was a little tricky at first because we wanted to tell EVERYTHING that happened in the story, but we had to pick the three most important events. We read The Mitten by Jan Brett to help us with this skill. We created a sequencing snowman and even got to act out the story with our very own white mitten. Our favorite part to act out was the really loud AA--AA---AACHO!!!! We will continue to work with sequencing next week.

In writing this week we began writing to pen pals.  So far this year we have been writing to Mrs. Burr's class.   We would write letters as a whole group.  This time we get to write our very own letters.  Some of us know our pen pals and some we have never met! We are really excited to have our very own friend to write to.  We spent a lot of time this week talking about greetings and closings. 

To kick off the new year we created our very own new year resolutions.  They are hanging in the hall to remind us what we would like to work on this year.  Some students want to read more, others want to help out more at home, and some want to stay up LATE!

This week in math we worked with story problems with coins.  We learned that it is silly carrying so many pennies in our pockets when we can switch the pennies out with dimes and nickels.  When we see a big group of pennies we have learned to look for groups of 10s and 5s.

For being a short week we sure did squeeze a lot in! It was a great week to start the new year.

-Mrs. Donohue