Getting Fancy!

One of the reading goals I have for all of your children is to expand their vocabularies this year. It can often be boring and monotonous to simply memorize a list of words and their definitions, so I try to make learning new vocabulary words fun and exciting by introducing the children to Fancy Nancy. She visited our classroom last week (my daughter Kate told me I could borrow her doll!), and we read Fancy Nancy's Favorite Fancy Words to get us excited about increasing our own vocabularies. Each Monday, I read a Fancy Nancy book to the children while wearing my tiara and boa, which the kids think is hilarious. I then introduce them to our new word of the week, which we add to our huge word collector in the back of the room. We add fancy words to this chart throughout the year. In the upcoming weeks, I will also give your children their own personal word collector to keep in their book boxes. This allows them to also be responsible for finding new and interesting words while reading.

We are almost finished with our first math unit of the year: data analysis. The kids were presented with five learning targets at the beginning of the unit, and have been working hard to master each target. Last week, the students worked in small groups to develop their own survey question that they could ask their classmates. We had lots of creative ideas, from "What is your favorite type of movie?" to "What is your favorite dessert?" After collecting their data, the groups were responsible for organizing their information into a bar graph, picture graph, and line plot. On Friday, they each used the Smartboard to share their results with the class. The group above asked their classmates, "What is your favorite football team?" and are seen presenting their picture graph to the class. The kids always get a little nervous when they have to get up in front of their peers, but I was really proud of all of them!

I hope everyone enjoyed the nice weather we had this weekend! My husband and I took Kate and Aubrey to Lynd's Fruit Farm on Saturday to pick apples, which was lots of fun for them. They had a little train set up that the girls got to ride in and a huge corn maze that we couldn't find our way out of! If you haven't been there yet this season, it's definitely worth the drive!