Gracyn continued with the chicken hatching project today. She began her chicken hatching observation booklet and made predictions about how many eggs she thinks will hatch, if they will be male or female, and what color they will be. We candled two eggs and found that one egg was not fertilized and the other did contain an embryo. We could see the embryo moving around in the egg. She drew a picture and wrote observations on what she saw in her booklet.

Gracyn began our lesson with the 5-minute timed addition facts quiz. Her accuracy is good but her speed has not really improved. Once Gracyn is comfortable with mental math the speed will come and this is great practice. From Gracyn's workbook, we worked on word problems. Once we read the problem, Gracyn had to determined the information given, the information that needed to be found, and whether she should add or subtract based on the vocabulary clue words. Then, she made a correlating number sentence.

We went to the library to select books for this week. She read "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", and we read " Scapegoat" together. Our strategy focus was reading and writing with the long 'o' spellings -oa and o-e. Gracyn completed writing about octopuses and we proofread her rough draft.

We began by practicing "Jingle Bells" (chorus) in its entirety. We then started "Old Macdonald" which introduced the repeat sign, and middle "C" position with both hands. Next we played through pages 14-17 in the Bastien primer and several memorized pieces.

Gracyn and I practiced her skills, comparing and contrasting and providing examples of goods and services, facts and opinions. We learned about where things are manufactured and located countries on the map. She will do some investigating at home to find places where clothes or shoes are made. She learned the 7 continents and 5 oceans. We read in the text about those. We read "A Fancy First Day" which was about inauguration day. We recorded new vocabulary words and she answered some reading comprehension questions. We completed worksheets about transportation, goods and services, and facts and opinions. We discussed the two States for the week - Maryland and Maine.

This morning, Gracyn took the unit 6 practice test so that I could assess any areas within the unit that Gracyn and I should focus on.  She did a great job.  We will work on a couple of concepts and take the test later this week.  The lesson covered today used related facts to find missing numbers.  Gracyn filled in number bond models by completing an addition fact to find the related subtraction fact.  To finish, we read The Gingerbread Pirates by Kristin Kladstrup.

design fundamentals. Gracyn is currently painting a picture to show the use of "analogous" colors from the color wheel. She is using red, yellow, and orange. She will then do some "holiday" projects.

Gracyn wrote one page of octopus information for her book. She read another Fly Guy book for independent reading and we discussed how her fluency improves when she reads 'in her head' first. From now on she will read her independent books silently first, and then aloud to me. She took the quiz for her current level on Reading Eggs and was able to move ahead one level.

Today we talked about Thanksgiving and the meaning behind it, and also we learned how to say it in Spanish. In addition we read a book on Raz Kids.

Gracyn read her word wall words and we played Hangman with them. I read aloud a chapter in the book Beezus and Ramona. Gracyn completed a word sort, sorting first by th, sh, ch, and wh and then by the vowel sound in the word. She read all the words. We looked at a nonfiction book about an octopus and selected notes for a story she will write.