Traveling Through China

Today in SWR we finished our very last two word families of the year!  We were so excited!  We also had a 32 point sentence that was a question and had a name.  We will have our Trimester 2 SWR test at the end of this week.  We will spend time reviewing short vowels, all of the letters of the alphabet and the sounds they make, red words, adding s to the end of words, and asking questions. 

In math we used our reference books for the very first time.  We LOVED flipping through our reference books and finding concepts we had already learned about in math and ones we are hoping to learn about soon.  We learned what a reference book was and completed a scavenger hunt to become familiar with how to find information in our books.  We already knew it was non-fiction and informational because it had a table of contents and a glossary.  When we were finished we played Fact Triangles with a partner.

We read The Paper Dragon today.  The illustrations in this book impressed us.  They were beautiful Chinese paintings.  We made predictions, asked questions and practiced retelling the events of the story in order.  We also learned three things that are very important to the Chinese. Ask your first grader what Mi Fei (the main character) realized was the strongest thing in the world and used to defeat the dragon. 

This afternoon we continued to work on our classroom realistic fiction story and chose the chacters, setting, problem and solution.  We cannot wait to finish this story! 

We traveled to Beijing today to visit the Forbidden City and Tianamen Square.  We took virtual tours of both of these places and recorded them in our China folders.  We are learning so much about the country of China.