Inner space caverns!!!
In ELA with Ms Andrea… the topic of our reading for this short week was topography! Our Betas learned why topographers make special maps, all that their job entails, and who uses topographic maps. After reading, we summarized the text and analyzed a prompt, then planned our response to it. Next week we’ll continue by organizing our notes and writing out our response.
As mentioned at Parent Support Night, the steps of our writing process are designed to teach students how to decipher meaning from a text, and to interpret and respond to writing prompts. Familiarity with these steps should lead to automaticity and allow a flow in our young writers’ ability to produce thoughtful, organized, and on point communication through writing.
In phonics this week we were introduced to several word families with the short /a/ sound, including: -at, -an, -am, -ag, -ap and -ad. Knowledge of word families provides a bridge between sounding out each individual sound in a word to chunking word parts, making the decoding process quicker and easier. A couple of our word families (-an and -am) are considered “sticky,” which means that it’s extra tricky to pull those sounds apart and to recognize the word when each sound is voiced separately. We also learned the following sight words: he, she, go, so, no, and and :)
Ms. Emma’s ELA group…had only two days of writing instruction, but still managed to complete the P and O steps of our writing process. Our prompt this week about sharing family recipes garnered many interesting conversations that made us all hungry. In phonics we worked through several trigraphs, played guessing games with our new sounds, practiced our high frequency words, had a spelling check in, and attended handwriting bootcamp.
In Ms. Andrea’s Math Group…finished their first math unit, focusing on Number Sense! All of their work & assessments will be sent home on Monday with the P&P so please take a look and be sure to congratulate your Beta on their growth so far this quarter!
Ms. Emma’s math group….modeled breaking numbers into smaller bits using part- part-whole mats. These mathematicians are excellent at finding all the combinations hiding inside numbers up to 12. We also continued to strengthen our number sense when decomposing dominos. Finally, we took a Unit 1 post assessment to see how much we have learned in just 3 weeks!
In theme…we explored caves! Before heading to our local Inner Space Cavern, Betas studied cave formation in all its glory. We discussed the various ways earth manipulates land to create solution limestone caves, glacier caves, sea caves and lava tube caves. Once they had a good handle on cave formation, table teams began planning their own cave dioramas. The crafting of these impressive caverns took patience, thoughtful design, and plenty of creativity. Betas ended the week on a field trip visiting the real deal! Words cannot express how thankful we are to have had all the parent support on our excursion, it truly made the experience unforgettable.
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