The past few weeks have been a whirl wind.  It's hard to believe that the first quarter has come to an end. Thank you to all who came to parent teacher conferences.  It was wonderful to sit down and talk with each of you.  Your children are precious and I am enjoying being a part of their learning journeys. 

We had an exciting day yesterday.  One of our butterflies emerged from its chrysalis right before our eyes.  It was an amazing sight.  Timing was just perfect.  We now have 4 butterflies in our butterfly habitat.  One of them has injured wings.  We have had some wonderful discussions about life, growth and compassion as we have studies insects.  Today we got up close with our hand lenses and looked at the body segments and parts of both the beetles and the butterflies.  The kids had a wonderful time.

Gogo came to visit during math today.  He ate an awful lot and had a tummy ache again.  We added up all the things he ate and discovered he ate a total of 107 things for breakfast.  No wonder he was ill.  We've been working a lot over the past week on how to make change.  This has been a very difficult concept.  We've also been working on place value of numbers with more than 4 digits.  We played the digit game on the smartboard today and had a blast. 

In reader's workshop we have begun a unit on visualizing.  Today we read Night Sounds Morning Colors.  What a beautiful text!  It does a wonderful job of painting pictures in our heads.  We have learned that readers want to awaken their senses as they read.  We want to not just see the story, but smell it, feel it, hear it, and even taste it sometimes.  We are also learning to track our thinking on post it notes as we read. 

Our writing unit pairs right up with our reading unit and we are working on adding more details to our writing in order to paint a picture in the reader's mind.  We are learning about powerful verbs and juicy adjectives.  The kids absolutely love writer's workshop and can't wait to write each day. 

We completed our Operation Christmas Child project last week.  The kids collected enough stuff to put together 25 boxes.  The had so much fun putting the boxes together for the children in Africa.  I saw true compassion in action last week as the kids worked in partnerships to fill shoe boxes for children living in poverty in Africa.  It was an incredible learning experience. 

Pictures coming soon.......