It was so was beautiful today, Gracyn decided she wanted to have our lesson outside. We continued working on related facts. Gracyn completed addition and subtraction problems and then circled the related facts. She was also given a list of numbers to write related addition and subtraction sentences. She had to determine which numbers made correct problems. Finally, Gracyn completed a 5 minute timed addition facts quiz.

Gracyn and I discussed a news article for the school newspaper. She will write about the chicken eggs she is incubating and hatching with Ms. Caroline. We worked on that article today and will finish in our next class. We worked through an exercise with illustrations about long ago versus present time relative to food, travel, houses, clothing and feasts. We read in the text about income, money, factories and products, goods, trade from other countries, and transportation. We used "fake" money to work on buying and selling and making change to purchase goods. She enjoyed this. We reviewed fact and fiction, fact and opinion, goods and services, jobs and money.

Gracyn made a beautiful snowflake to hang in her room. She chose a template, traced the outline, and then with scissors I cut on her lines. Once made, Gracyn used lots of green, silver, gold, white, and shades of blue glitter to decorate the snowflake. She also glued on sequins and foam snowflake stickers. We will hang it up tomorrow once it dries. Gracyn loves her finished snowflake.

We began with our read aloud story and completed chapter 1, continuing our strategy focus of making connections. Gracyn read a Fly Guy book for her independent practice. We read her word wall words and played a game of Hangman for practice. She wrote her last fact about shark teeth for her book.

We were very excited to get the holiday baking started so Gracyn and I decided to make M & M Christmas cookies. She mixed the butter, sugar and brown sugar in the KitchenAid mixer. She then added the eggs, vanilla, and flour mixture. Once the ingredients were mixed well Gracyn added 2 cups of red and green M & M's. We baked the cookies for 11 minutes.

Today's lesson covered related facts or fact families. I had Gracyn try to recognize a fact family to quickly solve problems instead of using addition and subtraction for each problem within a fact family. We focused on a few rules. The whole begins the subtraction sentence and ends the addition sentence, there are four related facts, two addition and two subtraction, and that each number is in all four facts. To supplement the lesson, Gracyn rolled two dice, added them together to make the 3rd number, and wrote a complete fact family. Finally, Gracyn completed a 3 digit addition word problem on the white board.

Gracyn continued the unit on natural resources today with a lesson on fast and slow changes to the Earth. We discussed things that happen quickly like earthquakes, floods, and volcano eruptions, as well as slower changes such as weathering and erosion. She also watched a short BrainPop Jr. video on weather and erosion and answered questions on the lesson in her science book. We began discussing our next project of hatching chicken eggs. She put the eggs in the incubator and we discussed how long it takes the chicks to hatch. She marked on a calendar how long the eggs will incubate and what day they will hatch.

Our read aloud book is "Beezus and Ramona" and we read a portion of chapter 1 today. Our focus for instruction was making connections. Gracyn read "Pigeon Needs a Bath" for her independent reading. We reviewed her notes from the shark book and she wrote the sloppy copy of her shark pages. We will add one more fact tomorrow.

We began with our traditional "Knuckle Song" duet. We then reviewed "Mary Had a Little Lamb" from memory on the black keys and in two white-key positions. We reviewed middle "C", note values and C-D-E-F-G in "C" position, and played through "Jumping Frogs" in the Bastien Piano Method Primer. We then learned a large portion of "Jingle Bells".

Gracyn began this morning's lesson with a 5 minute timed addition facts test. There were 100 addition facts and Gracyn scored a 53 which is very good for her first time. Her accuracy was excellent, answering all of the problems correctly. Speed will be the focus. We will begin the session 3 days a week with this test until she reaches 100% accuracy in the 5 minutes. Gracyn's lesson consisted of using a model to solve word problems. She used the information given to find the missing information. We focused on the part-part whole concept using cubes as manipulatives. To finish, Gracyn completed an enrichment worksheet to supplement the lesson.