I'm happy to report, at least for the moment, that our students have been staying fairly healthy and productive during this flu season. Those of us who did catch a little something didn't need more than a day or two to recover. We have not been hit with the serious illnesses that I have heard about in other schools, and I'm grateful for that!
Happy Valentine's Day to you all! Our class had a great vibe as those homework assignments, about showing appreciation for your classroom and school community, were hung or displayed in our classroom. It is so heartwarming to see the care and concern they show for each other, and how everyone is willing to help out a classmate. We have a great team here in Platte River!
Students have been working on fraction operations and equivalencies. It's very interesting to observe those who have made the transition to abstract thinking, and those who can use the materials to visualize how these mysterious partial numbers work. Students are finding out that mastering math facts is a very useful skill when doing this work.
Recently, a group of students has been meeting to do lots of math problems on white boards. This is simple practice of addition, subtraction, and, most commonly, long multiplication problems. They are showing remarkable progress and speed in doing these, and are asking almost every day to practice with me.
We are practicing several reading comprehension skills in our language groups, and some students are finding this a bit tedious, yet challenging. Some of the skills covered are main idea, compare and contrast, determining important information, making predictions, and inference. The difficult part is to find the text that supports an answer.
We are wrapping up our study of animal classification with students sorting animal pictures into the appropriate classes, and adding a few of their own too. It's been fun to learn about the unusual animals that don't quite fit all the characteristics of a certain class. Next week students will be starting a research report on an animal of their choice. It is my hope that they will be able to classify the animal all the way to its species, and relate what we've learned about the many body functions of animals to their specific animal.
We have begun our study of early humans. We will study five groups of early humans beginning with the Australopithecus. We reviewed the fundamental needs of people, and will refer to these needs as we discover how the earliest humans met them, and how they changed over time.
We welcomed three new fish to our tank, and are hopeful of their survival! We have learned that 10 times the water treatment chemicals had been used, and, now that this has been rectified, believe that we can soon have a healthy community of fish to observe and care for!
I want to give big thanks to all the families who baked for and/or bought goodies from our Critter Cash Sale! I was amazed at this wonderful community effort, and am happy to report that we made $153.00! That's a big payoff for our critters here, and I know they all appreciate it. They are well loved and cared for by all of our students!
Looking forward to more sunshine and warmer temps!
Mary
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