Our mealworms are changing!  We now have many pupa in our mealworm habitats.  It's pretty exciting to watch all the changes taking place in our mealworms.  We've observed several mealworms molting too.  We used our hand lenses today to look at the pupa and then drew what we observed.  We're looking forward to our first darkling beetle.  It could happen any day now. 

During our math lessons the past few days we have been talking and learning about equivalent numbers.  There are many ways to make a number.  We played a game I call Beat the Teacher yesterday and today.  The kids are given a target number.  They must then write down as many ways as they can think of to make that number in 60 seconds.  While they record their thinking on their dry erase boards I record mine on the smartboard.  Any equation or equivalency they come up with that I also have is crossed off the smartboard.  The object of the game is for the kids to come up with more ways than the teacher to make a number.  After eliminating all duplicates between kids and teacher today the kids had 14 and the teacher 5.  We play this game throughout the year and as the year progresses the kids really do some incredible thinking. 
We also added calculators to our math kits and learned how to program them to skip count. 

Reading pizza has been the topic of our reader's workshop this week.  We learned that reading is thinking.  Just sounding out words is not real reading.  Real reading happens when we combine words with thinking, much like a pizza isn't a pizza if it's just crust.  When we read the text is like the crust and the thinking we do is like the toppings. We read two books about pizza too.  As an extension of this idea, today we talked about a reading fog.  Sometimes when we are reading a fog settles into our brain.  We don't understand what we are reading.  If we don't understand what we are reading we need to go back and reread and slow down and think.  Thinking and understanding are a vital part of real reading. 

In our writer's workshop we have talked a lot lately about all the things that writers write about.  Today we created a chart with all the things that writers write about.  Since we decided that writers write about the treasures of their hearts (friends, family, memories, places, pets, knowledge, etc) we made our chart look like a treasure chest.  We will hang it on our wall to remind us of what we can write about. 

We have learned some new songs this week too. The kids are really enjoying the Alphabet Island song.  We are getting to know Active A this week.  We learned that he can be a bit of a naughty letter and gets into a bit of trouble at times.  Only two letters are allowed to babysit him.  Y babysits for him at the ends of words and I babysits for him in the middle of words. They both scold him a lot saying "A, stop that, A don't throw your peas."  When we see or hear the long A sound at the end of a word it is usually spelled ay.  When we hear the long A sound in the middle of a word it is often spelled ai. 

In spelling we are also working on their and there.  We learned two songs to help us remember how to spell there and their and when to use each one.  In addition, we are working on identifying base words and suffixes. 

We are learning a lot and having a great time together!