Gracyn continued the unit on living things today. She read in her science book about flowers and cones and how they are living things and have seeds. We went outside and collected some flowers and pinecones and observed them with the hand lens. She also began reading about different classifications for animals.

Today we reviewed, since we had been on break. We started with the Knuckle Song and learned some more of the second section. Then we played our duet. Next we reviewed Mary Had a Little Lamb on the black keys as well as on the white key groups C-D-E and F-G-A. We reviewed Jingle Bells, note values and played pages 10-19 in the Bastien Piano Primer.

Gracyn and I reviewed maps with Studies Weekly giant newspaper. We also looked at an issue on fact or fiction relative to the upcoming Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. We discussed civil rights and learned new vocabulary. She completed reading comprehension questions after reading "Shoe Store Lesson," a short story about Martin Luther King Jr.'s childhood and treating people fairly. We reviewed her calendar and discussed ideas for the next issue of the school newspaper. She will submit some illustrations and would like to do an interview. We watched a short video on Studies Weekly about Martin Luther King Jr.'s life.

Gracyn began the lesson by using review vocabulary words to complete math related sentences. We then completed 2 lessons from her workbook. The first, adding tens and the second, subtracting tens using numbers up to 100. For both lessons, Gracyn drew the tens, wrote the sum or difference, and how many tens there were. We used base ten blocks as models to complete the problems. Gracyn finished with a quick game of Shark Race. We each had a shark board surrounded with numbers. We both rolled a die and moved that many spaces. Then, we compared the numbers that were landed on. The player with the larger number won a counter. Gracyn wrote out the greater than and less than sentence to correlate with each roll.

design fundamentals. Gracyn is starting a new series of projects to show the use of 3D art forms. She started a fish project that will be "stuffed" to give a 3D "feel" to it.

New year, new books! We went book shopping at the library to select new books for the week. Gracyn chose a chapter book for our read aloud and many new selections for shared and independent reading. As assessment, I took a running record of her reading a level G book which she read with 100% accuracy and comprehension. I plan to continue assessing at level H because she has been taking on higher level books for guided lessons and doing very well with them. I anticipate a leap ahead.

Today we went over the story of Christmas and sang the Feliz Navidad song. We colored a snowman and a Spanish Santa with his maracas.

Gracyn played a board game that integrates reading comprehension in order to advance. She was also required to add by tens.

Gracyn was absent today.

Play games that require both math and spelling.