We're going to have a WHALE of a time!

We are learning about WHALES!! I am learning things I never knew about whales this week. Tomorrow, the kids will work on something called a webquest. This is like a scavenger hunt using links on the web. They will look for specific information about the whale they are assigned to research! I think they will really enjoy this experience, since we'll be using the laptops and there will be a few parents to help out (so I am not running around like a crazy person!). The goal is to read for information, organize the information on a research sheet, and make a plan for how to share this information with the class.

Today was very exciting, for many reasons! First, we had a terrific assembly called The Wright Brothers. There were two men who told the story of how the Wright brothers came up with the idea for the airplane. They sang some great songs and were very good singers!! I thoroughly enjoyed it!! The kids came back and wrote paragraphs about what they learned. There were some really great facts used in our paragraphs.

Another exciting part of our day was the work we did with multiplication. We started talking about multiplication yesterday. For some, this is a beginning skill. For others, this is developing. The most important thing to focus on is that multiplication is not a scary new idea...it is just repeated addition. We have started this concept with understanding an array (rows with equal numbers of objects). Today's homework included thinking about multiple packages of things. One way you can help at home is to take the opportunity to turn everyday things at home into a multiplication problem. Do you have a box of granola bard at home? If there are 12 in that box, how many would be in two boxes? Did you buy a pack of gum? How many pieces are in one pack? How many would be in 3? Stress that to solve these problems, you would just add a number a certain number of times. We are working on the answer being called the product.

We continue to work on learning cursive handwriting. So far, we have worked on cursive i, t, u w, r, and s. Which one do you think would be the hardest to learn?

That is some of the news for today! Thanks again for all the donations of pencils and tissues!