Please Be Mine, Valentine!

Lacy home-made Valentines!

What could be better than huge Valentines made with lace doilies and love? The kids had such a great time choosing colors and layering the heart doilies to give to their special moms and grandmas! 

She will love it!

Made with love!

So fancy!

Special delivery!

Giving Valentines is loads of fun, but delivering them and then opening ones given to us, is frosting on the cake! What delight as each child waded through the pile of valentines from their friends!

Now who is this one from?

Look what I got!

Love this one!

So many Valentines!

Valentine smiles!

 Our collection of Procedural (How-To) writing was sent home this week. We had fun learning the Friendly Letter format of writing this past week and will put it to good use as we launch our Persuasive Writing unit. Get ready for some requests, supported by powerful  reasons. We tried out our first persuasive letter on Friday - spoiler alert: sleepovers, movies, restaurants, play dates, and family outings have all been persuasively requested!

As we finished up our How-To unit, we also finished up our presentations of the group How-To project:

How to build a Lego submarine!

How To buy and use an ipad

Our How-To writing is ready for reading at home!

Social Studies this week focused on two of our greatest presidents in honor of President's Day - President Lincoln and President Washington. The kids really love non-fiction and true events about important people. They learned about the childhoods of both presidents and the events that shaped their presidency. We also had a chance to impress ourselves by learning to draw the White House, one of our national symbols.

Off to the White House!

White House artists!

One fun coincidence was that because of school store on Friday, kids came in waving their dollars and showing President Lincoln or President Washington's face on the bills!

Phonics and spelling rules are becoming a bit more challenging as we are introducing more spelling patterns, such as words with /oo/, /ay/, /ai/, etc. It can be helpful to write the weekly words on papers that are then sorted under the corresponding spelling pattern. Here is an ABC word work center:

Making silent e words

Topic 9 has been completed in math and we will move on to adding two digit numbers in Topic 10. Counting by tens from any number on the 100 chart and skip counting by 2s and 5s are important skills.

Our Penguin Info book!

Look what we learned!

Penguins everywhere!

I hope you had fun looking over your child's Penguin booklet. They worked very hard on assembling the booklet and writing the information they learned about penguin's habitat, diet, predators, and features. The background knowledge of animals we have studied around the globe will benefit us as we learn about animals and their structures and how they use body parts to survive in science.

I wish everyone a restful, healthy, and fun vacation week!

Mrs. Dagley