Animals

It was a pretty busy day. We started by practicing our informational writing skills. The students were asked to pretend to be a reporter for the Animal World magazine and to prepare a short article for their special edition for first graders about any animal. Some of the results were excellent like Lauren’s:

The lion is a beautiful animal. He is King of the jungle. But lions are very lazy. They sleep almost the whole day! Their wives are the ones who hunt for food while the lions sleep. The females go out to look for tasty animals to kill and eat. They bring back the food to the boys and the babies. The lion’s roar is very powerful, but lions can be sweet as well. They protect the babies and clean them with their tongues.

We read a great piece of informational writing in the Treasures anthology today, Charles Micucci’s “The Life and Times of the Ant.” I learned a lot about ants from reading this article and developed a great appreciation for them from this writer. We did another read-through of Annie while many of the students were at orchestra. I will have the hard job of casting the play in the next week. After lunch, we read another chapter of The Cay. And we reviewed some of our decimal skills.

Homework:  (1) Write spelling words 8-14 ten times each and write a sentence for each word. (2) Do the spelling jumble. (3) Write a half-page summary of the “Ants” story in Treasures, selecting the main ideas and most significant details only. Then answer questions 1-4 on page 455. Please copy the question as well as answering in a relatively complete sentence. (4) Do Decimals to Fractions 2. (5) Do “Multiplying an Dividing Fractions” on pages 307-308 of the math book.