To expand our studies on communities, we will explore the three main types of communities: rural, suburb, and urban. As an introduction, we read Town Mouse Country Mouse by Jan Brett. In this sweet story about two mouse couples, we watch them envy the life each other has and switch places. Each encounter new challenges and dangers in their new town vs. country homes. We practiced using our compare and contrast skills by generating ideas together to complete a Venn Diagram for the two characters. We added colored pictures of each mouse in their clothes to help us see them better. For the Town Mouse, Danny wrote: fancy clothes, townhouse inside, like the noise, and cat (chases them). For the Country Mouse: simple clothes, tree stump outside, like the quiet, and owl (chases them). We then noted that there are some things the same about the characters. We found that they were all mice, animals want to eat them, and they like their own homes best. This was a lengthy task as we worked to sound out words and Danny did a lot of writing. Using colored posters now hanging in his room, we reviewed the vocabulary terms for our three types of communities, rural (farms and open country), suburb (near a city), and urban (city and its many neighborhoods). For our history enrichment study, we continued Danny’s writing project about the book, The Knight at Dawn. We added one more sentence about how a knight rides a horse. We then searched Google and found a picture of a knight to add to the page. Next, we read chapter 4 in our book. In this chapter, Annie and Jack peered through the doors of the Great Hall to see a feast underway. Our follow up comprehension questions asked about the sounds the children heard at the feast (music, shouting, and laughter). Danny was also asked to recall some of the things they saw (fireplace, antlers and rugs on the walls, flowers on the ground, boys in dresses carrying trays of food, jugglers, and dogs getting bones under the tables). We then used a dictionary to find the word castle. Danny began to type a sentence about the meaning of a castle. We will continue this activity in our next session.