Learning in Room 210

We have a lot to share since our last post.  The children have been hard at work in all academic areas!  In writing we spent a lot of time learning about persuasive writing.  The children worked hard on a group project about Boston.  They brainstormed ideas, researched, drafted, edited, finalized writing, and created a final product.  The final product was a brochure about Boston.  They came out great and the kids were really proud of their efforts.  The next project the students worked on incorporated our Social Studies topic of culture with writing.  The students worked independently or in small groups researching their family's culture. After researching they had to apply what they learned about persuasive writing from their last project to create a culture book using Book Creator on the iPad. These came out amazing!  The children shared their projects with classmates and even compared and contrasted their country to another country using a Venn Diagram.  The children brought these home today to share with their families.
As we researched and learned about various cultures the children also illustrated a Landforms and Bodies of Water book.  They should be able to explain what oceans, rivers, seas, lakes, bays, peninsulas, islands, valleys, mountains, and continents are.  We also completed another geography activity called Journey Around the World.  The children had to find and label continents and oceans on a world map and then travel to each continent to find and label specific rivers, mountain ranges, oceans, countries and continent/country borders.  They enjoyed these geography/mapping activities and were able to apply all of this knowledge on their tests!!!!  Since we spent so much time on Social Studies these past few months we are planning on shifting back to Science.  We will be learning about fossils and will be heading to the Museum of Natural History next Friday, March 14.  After our fossils unit we plan on studying the earth, moon and sun.  Finally we will conclude the year with all of our animal units (reptiles, amphibians, insects).  The children will be coming home with lots of scientific information!
In math we have been solidifying place value knowledge.  Children have been working on expanded notation, adding/subtracting two digit numbers, greater than/less than and we are beginning a new unit today which focuses on three digit addition and subtraction.  I have seen the children grow so much mathematically in the last few months!  It is really exciting to see them making connections and applying what they have learned.

This week is Bookapalooza, so yesterday we kicked off Dr. Seuss' birthday by dressing up as our favorite book characters.  Some children even had green eggs and ham for lunch! YUM!  At the end of the day the children had a special Skype session with Bob Shea, the author of Unicorn Thinks He's Pretty Great!  The children were excited to ask him questions and share their costumes with him.  Another fun activity that we are doing this week in celebration of Bookapalooza is daily book trivia questions.  Each morning Mrs. Delia sends up a copy of questions that the students have to answer as a class and send back to the library by 9:00 AM.  We are hoping to answer all questions correctly this week!