Hi Friends, I've missed you all and I hope you all had a fabulous holiday break. Due to my pending move I was very happy to have an extra few days off. I will be closing (hopefully) on my old house on Tuesday, January 7. We are temporarily moving to an apartment in Burlington making some decisions of permant residency shortly after that. It was a quite hectic last couple of weeks. We had a huge estate sale, purged, donated, cleaned, dumped and cleaned all 11 rooms. We are down to a few boxes, clothes and a small dumpster load before the closing. It has all been an eye-opening experience. My husband and I have had our moments but we look forward to our new adventure in 2014. May you all find happiness and new adventures too!
So, looking ahead, we have many exciting things in store. First of all I have added a few new websites for math and reading to this blog. I hope everyone spent sometime reading and practicing some math facts over the vacation. Please keep your kiddos reading, writing and working on math daily.
Informative writing continues to be our focus in January. The children will be informing their audience on many topics and reporting on their favorites as well. As soon as we get back, all second graders will be setting goals for themselves for 2014. This will be be their first writing assignment for the new year.
In Fundations, our kiddos will be learning to tap, read and spell words with the r-controlled syllable type (r-controlled vowels, "bossy R". If you have any questions about rules and words to practice this month in Unit 8 or any other unit you can refer to Edine or check out this Fundations link.
The children will continue to ractice the use of BAR MODELS in Math In Focus for the next few weeks. Bard models are similar to part-part total diagrams for the old Everyday math. Children learn the bar model that equilibrates to a number model. When a part of the bar model is missing, the kiddos learn whether to add or subtract to find the missing number. Refer to In Focus Think Central for video help.
We will be finishing up our Social Studies unit on mapping. In the coming weeks we will begin work on Native Americans. It is a very engaging unit with the kiddos getting very excited about the learning and artifacts. To enrich this unit, we will have a visit from an actual native amenrican, David Krips and we will take a field trip to the Peabody Museum. The Peabody Museum at Harvard has a wonderful display of native american artifacts and educators that will lead us in talks about the regions of America. This field trip will be by bus to culminate the unit. More information will follow as the time approaches.
So stay warm and safe! Give the kiddos a hug from me. I look forward to great things in 2014!
