This Week in Review

Valentine's Day Breakfast

Valentine's Day Breakfast- Thank you to all the parents who sent or brought breakfast goodies with their children for our class Valentine's Day Breakfast.  Students chose from a buffet of cereals, potatoes, bacon, muffins, green beans, and smoothies.  They passed out Valentine's Day cards to their classmates and enjoyed reading the cards they received in return. A special thank you to all our wonderful parent volunteers who showed up, set up, and cleaned up afterwards.  You make it all seem so effortless.  We appreciate you! This year also brought an unprecedented number of dads to our party.  It was wonderful to see you all!

Reading- We continued our work with making inferences this week focusing our efforts on finding the author's purpose.  We discovered how authors write for a variety of purposes including to entertain, to report or inform,   and/or to persuade. We observed how often writers have more than one purpose in mind. Having inferred from the text the author's purpose we chose specific details from the text to support our reasoning.

Writing- We learned how to format a business letter while writing to persuade.  We practiced writing with specific audiences and specific goals in mind.  For example, some students chose to write to the principal with ideas of how to improve the school.  Other students wrote tor parents in hopes of being taken on foreign vacations.  We than came up with three persuasive reasons to support our goals.

Math- We continued our work with multiplication and division.  Students worked on identifying patterns in their threes, fours, and nines. We also worked on identifying different types of multiplication and division story problems including a.) array multiplication, b.) array division, c.) repeated groups multiplication, d.) division with an unknown group, and e.) division with an unknown multiplier.  Students should continue to work on memorizing their times tables over the break.


Science- The Pacific Science Center brought their Science on Wheels exhibit to school on Friday.  The exhibit featured several hands-on displayed that challenged students to think logically as they worked to solve puzzles.

Pacific Science Center's Science on Wheels

And in an admittedly pathetic attempt to toot my own horn, I must share about one exhibit in particular.  The display focused on probability and featured a glass canister on a turn handle.  The canister was filled with a million (I think) pebbles filled mostly with blue pebbles, and only one black pebble.  The idea was to turn the canister to move the pebbles about in order to spot the black pebble.  I found it!!!  That's a one in a million chance, right?  Does this mean the lottery is next?

Miss R. spots the one in a million black pebble