General News
The Gammas are rooting for Apollo to be released from Dell! We will keep you posted as we hear updates.Thank you for your continued kindness and support. Ms. Ansley is dropping off the homemade card bag later tonight.
ELA Update
This week we launched our study of poetry! We discussed the purpose of poetry (to express emotion) and a few of the different types including lyrical, free verse, and narrative poetry. We also discussed the tone and theme of poetry and how an author goes about communicating these things in an abbreviated amount of time by using certain devices like figurative language, vivid imagery, and more to communicate with the reader. We also looked at a few examples of famous poems by Emily Dickinson, William Blake, Langston Hughes, and more! We did a “book flood” with all of the poetry books in the classroom and shared some that we enjoyed. We are looking forward to poems and learning more next week!
Math Update
We had an interesting week in math as both classes were tackling grouping so we were able to add some fun collaboration into the mix–letting both classes work together to tackle some graphing challenges. We crafted many crafts this week using real data from dog/cat adoption cards. We made dot plots, bar graphs and the infamous stem-and-leaf plot! (This is a fairly rarely used graph that is VERY important to the state of Texas, according standards!) We decided to have some fun with it and make some creative stem-and-leaf plots combined with a partner dice game. The Gammas did a lovely job all week in math class!
Theme Update
Be still our HEARTS! Theme was so much this week. We way over-planned as human body systems has become a bit of an obsession for one unnamed Gamma teacher! 🙂 We started the week with a ‘build-your-own’ heart puzzle at the “Black Heart Cafe!” (Kudos to Chef Ansley who played a very authoritarian chef for the kid’s amusement! Watch out, Meryl Streep!) We identified the parts of the heart (and their functions.) Next, we embarked upon a multi-day super above-level station rotation and the gammas really rose to the challenge! (We made up circulatory system related nicknames and dressed the part of veins and arteries as we rotated through stations!) We had grand plans to create three-dimensional heart sculptures at week’s end but we plain ran out of time! (Luckily, we did have time on the last Shipe Park day to host a little Oscar party to view the Gammas amazing script plays. They were amazing!)
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