Gracyn and I began class by comparing the physical geography and climate of three different places in the U.S. - Oregon, Massachusetts and New Mexico. We added new words to her vocabulary cards - climate, natural resources, diverse, culture, immigrants. We read in "Social Studies Alive! Our Community and Beyond". We learned about immigrants and our diverse country. Gracyn understood how people from all over the world bring their culture to share with us in the U.S. We reviewed geography in locating and identifying regions of the U.S. and borders with other countries and oceans. We also began reading in the new "People and Communities" textbook about these same topics.

design fundamentals. Graycn is working on completing her paper plate "owl" and she did a new painting of a horse today. She also completed her "mixed medium" project.

Gracyn used cubes to show two equal groups to determine if given numbers are even or odd. She also solved real world word problems pertaining to the odd and even concept. Then, Gracyn practiced making picture graphs by transferring data from tally charts. Once the picture graph was complete, questions were answered to interpret the data. Finally, Gracyn surveyed other students to find out their favorite color and placed the data into the graph.

Gracyn began class with a couple of games of Bingo Math with other students. We then read a chapter of The Knight at Dawn and started working on chapter questions.

Gracyn and I read a Patricia Palacco book, 'An 'A' From Miss Keller' as our read aloud today. Our focus was on connecting to the character and noticing clues that foreshadow big events. Gracyn's independent reading was 'Olivia Goes to the Library', she chose to read to herself and then retell the story. For word study we did a word sort using the 3 common spellings of the long 'e' sound, cvvc (ee), cvvc (ea), and cvce.

We played addition hopscotch. I want to get her to practice her addition and subtraction in her head. She is not comfortable with that yet.

Today's lesson covered the concept of how even numbers and odd numbers are different. Gracyn worked with cubes to make equal pairs that represented even numbers and equal pairs with one cube left over that represented odd numbers. We discussed how any number with a 2, 4, 6, 8, or 0 in the ones place is an even number and all of the other numbers are odd.

We began with musical follow the leader on drums and piano. Next we played rhythm hopscotch. We learned an additional section of "It's a Small World," and discussed the pieces' patterns. We practiced a new piece entitled "On the Merry Go Round," and played through several older songs.

Gracyn did a chemistry experiment today called magic milk. She took some milk and poured it into a pan. Then she added a few drops of four colors of food coloring in the middle. She predicted what would happen if she touched the food coloring with a Qtip. She predicted the colors would mix. She touched the food coloring and nothing happened. Then she added a drop of dishwashing soap to the other side of the Qtip. She predicted that nothing would happen. When she touched the soap to the food coloring in the milk, the colors moved all around and created a very colorful display. She was quite impressed and wanted to do it over and over with different colors in different places. We discussed that the dish soap tries to break down the fat in the milk which causes the colors to move and mix all over the pan.

We discussed heart-opening yoga poses (V Day) and practiced some of the poses. Gracyn did several active movements that she chose for herself (shoulder stand, turtle, rock-the-baby). The last part of class was a discussion of mandala (symbol of universe) and Gracyn started coloring the Mandala handout I gave her.