An epic battle of ultimate rock paper scissors!
Happy Birthday Atlas, Ace and Burton!!!! Thank you for the delicious treats, Beta adores you!
In ELA with Ms Andrea… we got through the entire writing process for the first time!! This week’s close reading was on landforms. First, we read it: in whisper, chorally, and in partners.Then we determined the main idea of the informational text when we wrote our gist. Next, we picked apart a prompt to think more deeply about what we had read. This week we even got to use highlighters to highlight important facts & “power words” in the text! Finally, we were ready to write our outline and set it to paper in paragraph form! This was no small task for these Betas but, boy – did they persevere!!! So proud of this batch.
In phonics this week we reviewed short vowel sounds and read our first decodable reader. We added: see, can like, my, you and we to our Book of Sight Words. Handwriting Bootcamp continued to provide ample practice forming letters with proper strokes AND we worked so hard Monday-Wednesday that we got to have a game day on Thursday! Lots of fun word-making games were featured.
Ms. Emma’s ELA group…wrote their first prompt responses! It wasn’t always easy, but by breaking up the work into a few days we were able to more easily manage. First we started with pre-reading the informational text and writing the GIST (main idea). Then we analyzed our prompt and figured out what exactly it was asking us to do. Next we organized our ideas using TIDE and a few brainstorming techniques. Finally we were ready to make our rough draft. Our finished product was a paragraph long using text evidence. I am so proud of these Betas for working through all aspects of the writing process, they did great! In phonics we worked through l-blends, played go-fish with our high frequency words, had a spelling check in, and attended handwriting bootcamp.
In Ms. Andrea’s Math Group…The Betas were very busy this week! In math, we practiced ordering large numbers – in the hundreds! We also spent a day reviewing tally marks and tallied almost the entire classroom! Finally, at the end of the week we tackled identifying patterns in a series of numbers, using the pattern to determine a skip count rule, and using the rule to continue the series of numbers. It’s tricky stuff but the Betas did great!
Ms. Emma’s math group….continued to build strong number sense muscles. We started the week off by reviewing number comparison (greater than/less than/equal to) when playing a card game. Then we reviewed tallies and played a very fun memory game that works on subsiding skills. Finally we continued to subsidize all the way up to 20 using dot cards. As always, we made many journal entries to stretch our logical thinking and attended number bootcamp to get those digits facing the correct direction.
In theme…so many landforms, such little time! The Betas were introduced to natural features on Earth’s surface, as well as the water bodies often affiliated with them on Monday. We sorted them based on height categories: flat, positive or depression. They already knew so much!!
On Tuesday we crafted our own landforms using salt dough – HUGE shout out to Megan and Eliza for making our dough! 🤩 On Wednesday we continued to practice identifying landforms and talked about how they can be created by plate tectonics, volcanic activity, weathering, erosion & deposition. Finally on Thursday we painted our landforms & waterbodies! Along the way we celebrated our first three Beta birthdays of the year! Wishing your many happy returns of the day Atlas, Ace and Burton! 🎉
In case you’re up for extending your learning over the long weekend, here are a few ideas to get you going: landform video that we didn’t have time for in class, super fun free landform video game(!), or consider a visit to: West Cave Discovery Center, Mammoth National Monument in Waco, Texas Science and National History Museum @ UT, Stoneburner Family Rock Garden (also @ UT – THANKS for the info Ms. Anne!!) and mark your calendar for Austin Museum Day on September 20th! Just steer clear of the Bullock Texas State History Museum, as that may come up in Q2…(wink, wink)
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