May!

It's been awhile since my last blog post!  Let's do some catching up!

In Reading we are on our very last basal reader!  We just read "The Story of the Bluebird", which is about a little bird who is a afraid to learn how to fly.  He ends up on a little adventure and eventually forgets his fear of flying.  In doing so, he learns how to fly and is able to make new bird friends.  Our phonics/spelling skill was "igh".  This is a difficult vowel sound, but the students did very well with it.  We learned a rap to help us remember the "igh" in the words.  We also discussed what the plot of the story is.  We discovered the plot is all the "meat" in the story.  It's all the important events that happen to move the story along.  Next week, we will read the story "Frog and Toad All Year" and focus on the long a sound (ai and ay) as well as supporting details in the text.

We are just finishing up our Geometry unit in Math.  We discussed plane (flat) shapes and solid figures! Some of those solids are really hard to pronounce (hearing them try to say Sphere for the first time was quite entertaining)!  We got the hang of our pronunciations and even learned how to tell different shapes and solids from one another by using the number of sides, corners, flat surfaces, vertices and line types (curved or straight).  Our next and FINAL math unit will be on Fractions.  After that short unit, we will do some step up to 2nd grade lessons and review some concepts taught earlier in the year!  Time is FLYING by!

In Science, we are studying Organisms, Animal Families and the pond habitat.  We kicked off our unit by getting a visit from some batty bats!  We had such a great time learning more about these interesting, but misunderstood creatures!

We were able to see the musical Aladdin at Peacock on Monday.  It was AMAZING!  If your family has time, you should definitely check it out this weekend.  The middle schoolers and their teachers did an excellent job with this one!  The kids LOVED it!  A lot of them haven't seen the movie version of Aladdin so I'm thinking of showing it some time next week to do a compare/contrast activity on the similarities and differences!

I hope you all have a lovely weekend!
Ms. Petrucci