Today we watched and participated in yoga and quoya (yoga/dance) videos for kids. It was a fun way to incorporate some of our postures in a story-like way. I also showed Gracyn a new children's yoga book written by a friend of mine. It is a book of yoga poems with yoga illustrations.

Gracyn was prepared and ready for the Unit 6 test that she took today. The test covered determining the unknown, determining if equations were true or false, using strategies to add and subtract, and solving addition and subtraction word problems. She has fully grasped all of the lesson 6 concepts and we will be moving on to the next unit. We spent the remainder of our time playing number sentence memory. The numbers 2 - 10 from a deck of cards were placed faced down. We took turns flipping 3 cards over to see if an addition or subtraction sentence could be made with all 3 numbers.

Gracyn chose "Deck the Halls" as our read-aloud but it quickly became a read-together story. We read "The Pigeon Wants a Puppy" as our read-together story, practicing the strategies of predicting and noticing character behavior patterns. Gracyn read a Fly Guy book to herself and then read orally, she is increasing her reading stamina and fluency. She completed the cover of her book.

This afternoon, Gracyn and I enjoyed two fun books. The first, Snowmen at Christmas by Caralyn Buehner showed us all the fun things snowmen do to celebrate Christmas. Secondly, we read, Snowmen at Work, by the same author. In this book, it's revealed that snowmen don't just play all night--they have jobs to do, just like the parents of human kids. Dentists replace missing coal from snowman smiles while the pizza man delivers frozen pizza, and factory workers make the coolest toys in town! In both books, we found the rhyming words. We also discussed how the illustrator was creative in adding hidden pictures which we hunted on each page.

Gracyn wanted everyone in the school to know when the chicks are going to hatch so she made a poster today. She put a picture of each day to show how the embryo is developing for the 21 days. She made a countdown until Dec 19th when they are due to hatch and hung the poster up on the wall. She's going to mark off each day as we go along.

This morning, Gracyn and I finished our first Magic Tree House book, Dinosaurs Before Dark. We read the last two chapters in which Jack was saved by the giant Pteranodon and made it back to the treehouse. After finding the book about Pennsylvania, Jack and Annie began spinning in the tree house again, and it landed back at home. When arriving home, they realized no time had passed while they were away. After some discussion, they decided not to tell anyone about their magical adventure as they were fearful no one would believe them! Gracyn did a terrific job with the follow up comprehension questions as she recalled all 6 of them correctly. She was able to more independently formulate complete responses. She needed a few reminders for proper punctuation. We will begin the second book in the new year.

Gracyn and I reviewed concepts previously learned - goods and services, time, past, present and future, money and trade. We read in the text. Gracyn completed a book about time. We listened to Studies Weekly to learn more about money and trade, needs and wants, and we reviewed the 7 continents. She purchased some "goods" for her rat cage and we added new words to her vocabulary cards. We added to her new article about the baby chicks.

Gracyn's lesson covered how to determine if a number sentence is true or false. Problems were completed to determine if both sides of an equation were the same, or equal. Gracyn circled the true equations and crossed out the false equations. Also, problems in which Gracyn filled in missing numbers to make sentences that were true were completed. Today was the final lesson of the unit and I believe Gracyn is ready to take the unit 6 test tomorrow.

The other day, Gracyn and I looked on Pinterest together and she chose a couple of gifts that she wanted to make for her parents. Today, Gracyn began 2 projects that will be completed within the next couple of weeks. She wants to keep them a surprise so I am not going to describe our session. She is very excited and working very hard.

We read "Pigeon Wants to Stay Up Late" as our shared story and Gracyn read "There Was An Old Woman Who Swallowed Fly Guy" as her independent story. She made the title and contents pages for her book and started on the final draft for publication. We practiced encoding words with the -ar spelling pattern.