"Ms. Carlberg, the days just fly by faster and faster! Make it stop!"

I couldn't agree any more with the kiddo and his above comment. I absolutely can not believe that it's April already. However, if you were to visit our classroom and see our kids, you would definitely know it! We are getting so smart! I am amazed everyday by the problem solving skills, communication skills, and friendship that are flourishing in our classroom.

We have been busy at work this week working with the letter Y (did you know that it has several sounds?! Did you know that we know what the word 'several' means?! I'm not kidding, we're brilliant!) We learned strategies for reading words with Y's and figuring out which Y sound they have. In math we have been using base ten blocks to show numbers so that we can learn about the tens and ones place. We are also using <,>, and = with numbers as we compare them. Today we started to learn about turn around facts. (4+6=10, 6+4=10) As we were using our ten frames to write these facts, I was astonished at the wide variety of problem solving I saw. Some kids were counting in two's, some were regrouping to make "easy numbers" as we call them, some were using what we know about doubles to add. WOW! I wish you could see it!

We are thrilled to announce that we now have living creatures in our classroom! We are starting our spring science unit that is focused around insects. (Don't panic families, no insects will be coming home for "pets") The purpose of this unit is to explore insects and learn how they work together to help other animals and humans. Today our mealworms arrived and we absolutely loved studying them.

Heaven wasn't too crazy about them...and that's
ok too!

Here's what we noticed about the mealworms:
 -They have long bodies, but only a couple legs near their front.
 - They don't bite or sting you.
 - They dig in sawdust.
 - They move a lot!
 - They have two eyes.
 - They tickle your hands when they crawl on you.
 - "They are the best animals in the whole world!"

This week we have also been learning the difference between tattling and reporting. We learned that tattling is telling an adult to get someone in trouble. Reporting is telling an adult because someone is going to be hurt or is being hurt. We made a T-Chart showing some examples of each and then discussed what we can say if we need to report or solve a problem ourselves. Check out our chart!

We will continue to work on using calm voices when we say "Please stop." or "I don't like it when...". When discussing this concept, one student said it best: "We just need to use peace. I know we all can do it, so let's just do it!" I couldn't have said it better myself.