Gracyn continued her lesson on sharks today. She did a craft where she made a shark out of construction paper. She cut out eyes, eyebrows, and teeth and glued them onto her shark. She wrote a short paper on her opinion of sharks. When we began the lesson with sharks, she said she didn't like them because they were scary. Today she wrote about how she likes shark because they are important to the ocean and the eco system.

Gracyn created a story by spinning a wheel on the internet to give her five prompts. She used those creative prompts to type a story. She chose to write a newspaper article about a noisy elf with a magic hat. Gracyn focused on spelling, sounding out words, punctuation, and capitalization.

We continued our reading and discussion of 'The Boxcar Children'. Gracyn really flexed her reading muscles today and read a 48 page level K book. Her comprehension and fluency were excellent. We worked on identifying complete sentences and completing those that were missing either a subject or predicate part.

design fundamentals. Using the importance of lines, shapes, and colors, Gracyn used our time today to create several designs and pictures of her own choosing. She created a frame around each drawing using Hearts and spirals, then created a drawing to put in the middle of each frame.

Today we continued our unit on Economics with the study of Entrepreneurs. I used the biography of John D. Rockefeller as a starting point as he is one of the earliest entrepreneurs in US History.

Gracyn and I read and discussed the next two chapters of 'The Boxcar Children'. We worked on making connections to the characters. Gracyn read a level K book for guided reading with a focus on reading multisyllable words. She was able to grasp the rather confusing concept of leap year within the text. She also typed her short response to a comprehension query.

Gracyn returned to her geometry unit and began fraction concepts. We began by sorting 2-dimensional shapes using the number of sides and angles as given rules. Gracyn read a rule then circled shapes that matched the rule. Then, she partitioned rectangles into same-size squares, counted the number of rows and columns, and multiplied to find the total squares.

Today we had some video difficulty, so we listened to "The Voice", kids style from Australia. We listened to the contestants and made some of our own critiques. The girls ages were close to Gracyn's age, so she enjoyed this exercise.

Gracyn and I took turns giving each other addition and subtraction problems to solve. She solved 3-digit subtraction problems which required regrouping in the tens and hundreds place. Also, 5-digit addition problems were solved which required regrouping in all of the place values.

Gracyn practiced solving 3-digit addition problems. First, she drew quick pictures to model the problems before solving. Then, she solved vertical problems which required regrouping in the ones, tens, and hundreds place. Gracyn also solved word problems pertaining to 3-digit addition.