January Learning

Even though we have had days off of school because of snow and ice, we are still getting a lot of learning done...in fact, today Blake shared that our brains have grown so much since we started school this year!

When we got back from winter break, Maddy treated us to some venison.

We read about how Pa prepared venison in our current read aloud book, Little House in the Big Woods.

When we began reading Little House in the Big Woods, I showed them this picture and had them predict what they thought it was:

They finally realized what the above photo was when we got to this point in the book after the Ingalls family slaughtered a pig:

We spoke about how back then they didn't waste any part of the animals.  They were shocked to learn that the girls actually played with a blown-up pig bladder, just like a balloon.

Early January Mrs. Edwards came into our classroom to make math number bracelets with us.  Each bracelet has a given number of beads on it and it will help us with our number combinations to ten.

LEADS classrooms and teachers were also lucky enough to work with an inquiry educational consultant named Jen Burton.  She inspired students with higher-level thinking and inspired teachers with innovative teaching practices.

We learned about the strategy of inferring when we read.  We look for clues in the text or picture and use what we know to infer what the author means, even though the author didn't come right out and say it.

We practiced inferring meaning by reading the poem  Things by Eloise Greenfield.

We practiced inferring with nonfiction texts, too.

We left tracks of our thinking on post-it notes.

We worked really hard!

We are currently starting our next big inquiry on animals.  The first order of business was to sort and organize our classroom library books so that we can easily find the books we need.

We did a mini-inquiry to start thinking about how we could do this by sorting and exploring plastic animals and animal photo cards.

To top off our day, we made butter!  Many asked for the recipe...so here you go:
Fill a jar halfway with heavy whipping cream.  Screw on a tight-fitting lid.  Shake a lot until the butter forms in a ball.  Pour out the buttermilk that is left and rinse with cold water. Add salt, if desired.