September 19, 2007- by Room 40

Are you a savvy shopper? Today, Mr. Kootman told us how we can save money by using coupons we find in newspapers, magazines, on boxes or even in Mr. Kootman’s shirt pocket.

We began the day by reviewing math, which included a Quick Review and a Mixed Review. These are short and quick math problems that are based on material we should already know. Our new lesson for today was subtracting across zeros. This is when the top number of a problem has a lot of zeros, so we have to borrow from a greater place value. It can get confusing because there can be a lot of crossing out and borrowing.

In language arts, we read “Escape”, which was a story from the book Charlotte’s Web. It is about the risk that Wilbur takes when he leaves the pig pen. One of my favorite vocabulary words from this story is appetizing, which means giving the desire for food. After we read the story, we created our own tree map for the story. This helped us to organize our ideas and make sure we understood the story. Then, we wrote a summary for the story. Mr. Kootman says that the more we write for our organizer, the easier it is to write our summary.

After lunch, we created our very own map of California, with the four regions in different colors. We used water color paint to make the regions stand out. We also included a key on our map. We were all heartbroken that we did not get to read School Story after lunch. After we made our map, we went home to get ready for our field trip to the Avo Theater tomorrow.