Math Word Problems and Goo

     UGH, math word problems.  They are soooooooooooo tricky.  We've been practicing all week and I'm definitely seeing improvement.  I have been encouraging the students to look carefully at the answer they get to see if it makes sense.  "If Timmy starts with 67 crayons and brakes 12 of them.  He couldn't possibly have 89 unbroken crayons."  Encourage your child to double check if their answer seems reasonable.   

     We have started writing our biography notes into a report.  Many students really know their famous person facts.  We wrote half yesterday, half today and the children think its FUN.  WHOO HOO.  How great is that?  Most reports are edited and ready for the final copy.  Presentations will start next week.  I'll send home your child's specific day by the end of this week.  Don't stress out about this......remember "fun". 

     We have lots of different things going on during reading block.  Everyone is reading non-fiction text.  Some students are reading about volcanoes, some Chinese New Year, and we all are reading about our government.  Today we used post-it notes to jot down facts that we thought were most interesting from our books.  

     Here are some of the learning centers we visited recently.

fact/opinion sort

sentence scramble

number ordering

missing addend

noun sort

snowman money

prefix/suffix sort

counting by 5, 10 or 100's

rhyming match

     I'm sure you are all aware that next Friday is a half day.  Well, I've been promising for months that we'd make goo in class.  It took me this long to get the main ingredient-Borax.  So we are finally ready.  I thought that we'd hold out until that half day, snow make up day, that wasn't REALLY supposed to be a school day and make it then.  Why not spend the day with learning fun?  Warning, there will be food coloring involved, so save that special spring outfit to wear a different day.  

     This is Petey.  He came in a junk mail catalog I received and I fell in love.  So here he is reminding us that goo is coming soon.