One of our mammal groups is studying coyotes.  We were able to see a dead coyote at the pecan farm on our field trip to Yegua Farm yesterday.  Very white teeth!
We have been working on various projects related to reptiles and birds.  We've connected spelling (reptile words), grammar (bird verbs and collective nouns).

We learned about our fantastic brains and made a booklet to capture our new knowledge so we could store it  in our brain's filing cabinet with the help of the hippocampus.  We are looking at how we can change and grow our brain.

  We finished up the third module in math in the orange and purple groups. In the purple group we've been rounding and ordering 3 and 4 digit numbers and multiplying by 2 and 4.  The orange group was working with three digit numbers in all sorts of ways and working with addition strategies building on the doubles facts and the make ten facts.  
We have discussed the size of changes (from the small ripple of a glitch to large changes that affect the rest of your life) and applied it to a book we read about people who have to move off their mountain in Appalachia, in order for a park to be built, When the Whippoorwill Calls.   We have been talking about good manners at school this week in preparation for our upcoming family feasts.  I'm sure you can help remind your child before the feast to use these super great manners...and at every meal!  Happy Thanksgiving!

Stamping spelling words in the STEAM lab is fun and so is watercolor painting spelling words or writing them in chalk on the driveway.

Other word work included Scabble, and silly sentences among other things.

We are hard at work on small group research projects.  Most students have finished the reptile book and are on to mammal tri-boards.  

We've made an Appalachian craft:  cornhusk kitchen witches for Halloween.  You should drop in to see them flying around our classroom.

In math both groups have worked with time and addition. The purple group  also worked briefly with 2D shapes...rectangles and rhombuses.  

We have a new companion for Lola.  He is either going to be Lemonzest or Johnny Lemonseed.  It is a tie vote currently.  This canary is a gift from a school family.  So far he and Lola are curious about each other, and haven't started bickering.  They are not sharing a habitat, but are in close proximity.  

Our class has read a book and seen several films about the story of Johnny Appleseed.  We have been doing some apple projects and orchard mapping.  First we had an apple taste test and then we made dehydrated apple chips.  Our mapping project so far has Johnny and the orchards.  Next week the covered wagons will roll in and then cabins will be built.  

In grammar we have started with barebones sentences (article, noun and verb) and then added an adjective.  We will continue to extend them as we expand our parts of speech knowledge.  We also used stamps and stickers to write rebus stories.  In reading, students are learning to go back and underline evidence to answer questions about the text.  

Our orange and purple math groups have moved into Module 2.  The orange group is working with number lines and the purple group is working with triple digit addition with composing.  You can help your student by working on the making 10 facts (2+8=10, 7+3=10) and the doubles (like 6+6, 7+7).   Ask them if a numbers is odd or even.  Some students need more work on this.  
We are continuing to research reptiles and the 4 specific reptiles that the kids voted to study (coral and rattlesnakes, red eared sliders and spiny lizards).  Yesterday we learned some crazy stuff about coral snakes...ask your child what a "micro fart" is.  

We are enjoying the tales of Molly Whuppie with great relish.  Our class song for the Woodland Faire sprang right out of one of the stories in this wonderful book. 
As usual there is too much to tell, but hopefully you have the gist of it, in case your child says they didn't do anything at school today. 

We read WHEN I WAS YOUNG IN THE MOUNTAINS, by Cynthia Rylant last week.  This week we've been working with the vocabulary and finding nouns.  We made a delicious buttermilk cornbread recipe and turned heavy cream into butter.  Today the Parakeets posed for pictures with snakes draped over their necks like the kids in the book.  We began a study of the Appalachian Mountains with this story of a coal mining family. 

We've been graphing...lengths of spaghetti, distance a paper airplane flies, favorite superheros, plant growth and more.  Here is a gallery of our recent work.

 Our primary writing goal this semester was to develop informative paragraphs with evidence and content vocabulary. Each essay needed a conclusion as well as a topic statement.  Toward this end, students wrote four informative paragraphs, adding to the complexity of their paragraph structure as they learned and practiced new writing objectives.  Students began with a review of nouns and verbs and then were encouraged in the use of adjectives to provide detail in their writing.  Simple sentences were turned into compound sentences using conjunctions as students developed their writing craft. 

Later in the semester, each student put together a booklet about grizzly bears. Initially, students worked in small groups to generate questions that would stir curiosity about grizzly bears.
Why grizzly bears?  

​We wanted to learn about grizzly bears after reading Moccasin Trail.  ​The main character, Jim, survives a grizzly attack.  We have been studying early settlers.  

When we thin the new rows of kale and carrots, Maybelline gets a treat!

We learned about the pea family last week in gardening.  This flower has a banner, a blade and a keel.

This week we are learning about cotyledons, monocots and dicots.  We have an experiment going with bean and corn seeds.  Mono means one and di means two.

In solar science we made a solar oven in a pizza box.

 We are working hard to finish building the Calavera STEAM projects because we still have to write them up.  Some students are finished with the critter book, and we will soon be putting our recommendations into practice.  

In math we have been learning a few special multiplication facts...6x6, 8x8, and 3x4. We are primarily trying to gain an understanding of the connection between repeated addition and multiplication...the bigger picture of what the x symbol means.   I hope you are working on the 3's and 4's at home.  We need your help to master them.  Play practice is the other significant piece of our weekly effort, but we have also been learning about contractions (fan boys) and prepositions.  We have taken on new cursive letters like e and worked in spelling with consonant clusters and vowel pairs.  In reading, one group has a lit circle with Rules, a book by Cynthia Lord.  Other reading groups work with Brooke. We are all working on comprehension as well as fluency.  We are also planning our class Christmas party/food drive.  We drew Secret Santa names today.  

This was a really fun math trail.  We were working on rounding to the nearest ten last week.  This morning we had a short lesson on rounding to the nearest 100 before setting out on the trail. Happy Halloween from the Brown Funny Bunnies. 

Calaveras:  We've been reading Funny Bones,  the story of Don Posada Guadalupe and Dia de los Muertes.  We made our own calaveras with our cursive name cut outs this week.  Other projects have included "How to..." writing, descriptive paragraphs, verb tense cartoons, landform flap books, reaping basil, composting, planting carrots, place value exploration and regular Math Trail Mondays. Here is a photo blast of recent work.
​

And here are our bunnies in action inside and outside...

The biggest news is that we have a new student, Henry.  Our class is full; full of kids, full of joy, full of activity. 

We are working with our new Math Trail Map, "Take Away
Treasure Map."  Each station has things to count, find the 
difference and move to the next station.  When completed, all the differences are added together and then they subtract 2 to get
the final total.  Correct answers get you to the treasure. 

In the process, the kids are outside in the dewy grass in the cool morning on Mondays, warming up for their week.  On Tuesday mornings we are gardening.  Last week we learned about earthworms and got our bin.  The classes were very eager to handle and investigate the worms. Vikki Hutto is teaching the gardening class and so far we have been working with the Polar Bears.

Tuesday afternoon we had our first solar science class with Chris Martin.  We created a scaled down model of the solar system,
which started near the front gate, went across the driveway, 
and almost all the way down the hill. 

We've been completing research in groups about parakeets,
bunnies, goats and ducks, looking for ways to improve their diet and habitat.  We've also been working with a list of spelling and vocabulary words each week that come from our weekly picture book read aloud.   The students will be bringing the spelling list
home in order to have help learning to spell the words.  Our
spelling week will generally go from Wednesday to Wednesday.  Reading groups are working on fluency, accuracy
and comprehension. We have  been working with nouns and
verbs, talking about schema we build from our experiences that we can reach into when we write, and reviewing complete and
incomplete sentences.  We are still reading Flora and Ulysses
​and trying to learn more about squirrels.  Our school internet has
been on the blink since Harvey, so we have run into great
difficulty accessing the "All about Squirrels" videos we had hoped to watch."  We really want to have our internet working again
soon!   Did you know a squirrel nest is called a dray?