Patterns all around!

Our 4th week of school was a very successful one! We learned and practiced may skills.

In math class we practiced identifying pattern units and even made some patterns of our own. We also found mistakes in patterns and corrected them and extended them. Here are some examples of patterns made by students in our class this year.

Over the next two weeks we will explore numerals, place values, and different ways we can represet numbers. We will use base ten block and unifix cubes to practice these concepts.

In social studies we have finished up our unit on communities and different areas such as urban, rural and suburban. We explored common features of these types of communities and used our imaginations to pretend what it would be like to live in the communities we do not currently live in.

Science class brought us a lot of inquiry. We focused this week on the most important science question: "How do you know?" We created a list of questions about the items we could observe in our classroom and then narrowed those down to a list of 3 that we explored. We hypothesized, observed and drew conclusions to these questions through measurement and recording of data in our science journal.
Take a look at some of our inquiries below:

Next week we will start our combined study of the Earth's surface in both Science and Social Studies. As a fun and very scientific way to study the Earth's surface I ask that each family send a zip top bag to a friend or family member that does not live in the Volusia County area and have them mail the bag with a few scoops of the soil they have in their yard. We will use these samples to explore texture and content.

Comprehension is key in reading class and we continue to practice our reading daily. This next week we will practice our reading skills of plot development, characters and setting, as well as summarizing and identifying main ideas and details. These skills help students better understand what they are reading and allow for greater comprehension. We will also practice phonics skills centered around words with short /o/ and long /o/ following the o-e pattern found in words like mop and mope respectively in 2nd grade while 1st graders will focus on short /a/ and /i/ words such as cat and hit respectively.