Happy New Year!

Today's been a full day! I introduced the newest vocabulary words in Wordly Wise. You can review their meanings below.

Lesson 7

We also entered five new spelling words into our Spelling Dictionaries:
knew, new, won, wear, where

During math, we first reviewed the multiplication facts. This was prettier before I uploaded it to Slideshare, but perhaps it can still be helpful when practicing your math facts.

The math lesson focused on reading large numbers (into the ten thousands). There is a tutorial here that might help, and you can also use this site or this one for a review. There is a fun game here from Toon University you might enjoy.

I also like the games Guess My Number, Place a Number, and Place a Number II.

After lunch, we shared a few blogs that hadn't been shared yet. We also talked about our next Social Studies project: Explorers. The students named a few famous explorers they remembered such as...



After we discussed why explorers might have been interested in traveling to unknown areas of the world, we watched a video about Christopher Columbus from History's Mysteries. It was a lot of fun!

This afternoon we talked about our Reading Counts goals for the year and calculated how many points everyone would need to earn each month in order to reach those goals. It helped everyone set appropriate goals for January.

At the end of the day we visited the library for a bit of silent reading and discussed the results of our lima bean/plaster experiment from last month. Evidently plants DO have the power to make rock crack and crumble! There will be more about that later, but you can check out some examples of weathering here in the meantime.