One "smart" bunch!

We're really focusing on adjectives and nouns this last week or so, and to help the boys and girls remember the difference and explore some creative words, we did a super-smart, super-fun activity on Monday!  

After I handed out the nouns: the paper and the Smarties, it was time for the kids to get to work on those adjectives (describing words). Students worked together with their elbow partner and game up with some really great adjectives!

While we'll be talking a lot this year about fiction and non-fiction texts, we had a kind of introductory lesson to them on Monday.  I used this photo of books from our Fall/Halloween collection to get the discussion rolling.  

This afternoon we continued our review of subtraction strategies and we had a quick quiz. The quiz (pictured below) was a problem that was similar to the ones we have been practicing. The boys and girls are learning about the key words that tell us to add or subtract, or in the case of the problem below, do one and then the other. 

Once they got started, I found the boys and girls needed further practice with this type of question, so we're going to try a different, but similar quiz on Wednesday.  We instead used the quiz as our sample problem and we talked about the types of strategies used to solve these types of problems.