Our new unit 'Toys n' Time' focuses on changes that have occured with toys and games over time. We began the unit looking at our own families over time. The children made a family tree looking at relationships to their parents and grandparents. The concept of time is more difficult for some children than others. We had a wonderful field trip to the doll hospital in Lisbon. We saw antique dolls and other toys. Upon our return to class,we concluded that plastic, batteries and now chips are an essential part of modern day dolls and toys! We are off to Sintra on Tuesday to visit the toy museum.

We wrote creative stories and stories about animals this week. We continued with our investigations into long vowels and explored beginning blends. The children have grown confident with their reading skills and are beginning to explore different types of text skillfully.

In maths this week we explored place value and discovered the value of ones, tens and hundreds in numbers such as 6, 33, 99 and 100. We explored time and reviewed days, months and seasons in a year.

Our Carnival Celebrations were a success! Take a look at our slideshow! The children had a wonderful time at the parade!

Our Unit of Inquiry, 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle' has come to an end! The children enjoyed the unit immensely, especially creating new art/items out of recycled materials! They came away with a clear understanding of the central idea and will easily be able to apply what they learned to their everyday lives. The theme of recycling is all around us in Portugal!

This week we continued working on the long /e/ sound. Some of the children reviewed the story 'Pete and his beans', others read 'Zeke'. In handwriting we worked on writing the letter 'F' and writing sentences with words beginning with 'F'.
We worked on student whiteboards and practiced breaking words into syllables, investigating rhyming words and unscrambling words that were out of order in a sentence. All the children particularly enjoyed this activity!

This week we had fun with measurement and quick recall of number facts to 20. We explored length and measured our feet using clips then compared the length of our feet using a ruler. We discovered centimeters and learned that there were 30 centimeters on our rulers.We explored measurement using cubes, clips, plastic frogs and weights of 10, 20 and 50 grams. We even used salt! We also investigated,capacity, mass, and estimation. We worked with partners and recorded our findings.

The children have really enjoyed our Unit of Inquiry 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle'. We completed our homemade plant hangers! We used used cut up plastic bottles and glued on bits of colored tissue paper. Last week the children had a wonderful experience learning about the process of paper making with Ms. Newton in 2N. We decorated the newly created paper and attached acrostic poems with the words 'reuse' and 'reduce' unto them. The children were able to reduce the amount of trash on our bulletin board landfill by moving the trash( paper, plastics, glass) over to the appropriate recycling bins on the opposite side of the board. We did. however,run into a dilemna! In the landfill we found wood, batteries, and peels. We decided we couldn't allow these items to stay in the landfill and we needed a solution. We sent organic materials into the compost bin, the batteries to the store bin and we decided the wooden items could be reused,repaired or recycled into firewood! The children learned how to make a train track out of recycled paper!Take a look at the slideshow and Nuno's 'Show and Tell'.

This week the children were involved in a variety of activities reviewing all long vowel sounds and reinforcing the long /e/ sounds. We read the long /e/ story 'Pete and the Bean' over again and the story 'Zeke' was introduced in class. The children have been tuning up their listening and comprehension skills! Each morning they are excited to discover more about Eggbert and they have been writing their own adventures about him. If he hasn't visited your home yet, he will do so!

In maths we reviewed number bonds to 10 and began to explore number bonds to 20. We investigated the concept of partitioning and began by partitioning numbers any number between 10 and 20. We continued with addition and subraction sentences to 20 but instead of investigating sums/totals of addition and subraction facts we looked at strategies used to find a missing number within an addition or subtraction sentence. ( 8+ _ = 12) and ( 15 -_ = 13)