This Week in Alpha
(Photo credit: Kristin Vrana, Ezra’s Mama!)
Water, water, everywhere…
Alphas continued their journey into the deep by admiring an incredible quality that many Twilight Zone creatures have: bioluminescence! We oohed and ahhed at their pulsating and flashing lights that they use to defend, mate, camouflage, and capture prey. Then, we used neon paints to create our own jelly fish, salps, vampire squid, ghost fish, and siphonophores, to name a few.
Then we took an even deeper dive into the Aphotic Zone!
We did a demonstration with salt water and flashlights to see for ourselves how light is blocked by thicker and thicker layers of salt water.
Alphas learned that it was only recently that we’ve been able to see what’s in these dark zones of the ocean. We had student helpers hold up glasses containing salt water next to a big tank of saltwater and saw how much light was dimmed with each glass as Ms. Kim shone a light through them.
The light is very bright when there is nothing between it and the piece of paper…but when it has to shine through water, will it be as bright?
“Turbidity” is caused by particulates in the water – it’s all that tiny stuff, like salt, sand, and marine snow, that blocks the sunlight. The deeper you go, the more particulate matter there is blocking the sunlight!
The Alphas did a little diagram of the layers of the ocean…
Alphas learned that light wasn’t the only impediment; water is heavy. That’s why Ms. Kim had the tank of water on the rolling cart- she could lift it – and it was only HALF-FULL! The deeper we go in the ocean, means that there is more water is on top of us, putting more and more pressure on things below it! Scientists have always been curious about what’s in the ocean, but they were unable to see very far down because their bodies couldn’t survive the lack of air at first. Once they could carry air with them, they couldn’t survive the pressure. We then looked at some of the earliest successful submersibles. and were super-excited to create their own – and super-challenged to design one with their table teams. We saw how John Cameron was able to go to the depths of the Marianna Trench with his cool Deep Sea Challenger, which took 7 years to create with the hard work of a team of engineers and scientists! Alphas thought that there were probably a lot of ideas that didn’t work, and a lot of ideas and designs that weren’t chosen – good food for thought as they embarked on their collaborations, which are turning out to be really awesome!
Jude uses the light table to help him draw the inside of his sub after he flipped the exterior version over so he could draw on the back of the paper….like making an X-ray of the sub!
This week in Math…
Ms. Emma’s Math Wizards…
Started the week off with more advanced math! These alphas are excellent at double-digit addition and subtraction. We played lots of games and diligently worked through regrouping problems.
The latter half of our week was spent exploring shapes! We started with a review of 2D shapes and their attributes. Then, we sorted them into groups of polygons, quadrilaterals, and both. We quickly moved onto exploring 3D shapes and found many recognizable shapes… 
Then we constructed our own 3D shapes using toothpicks and marshmallows!
It’s harder than it looks!
And some time for dominoes…
Ms. Kim’s Mathletes…
After we made our February calendars and shared our Polygon Pals, we had a cube-tastic week, along with lots of computation and counter-arguments, too :)
We’d just drawn a picture of a tree house in Language Arts… so we hunted our drawings for any hint of cubes…then we learned how to draw the optical illusion of a cube using the 2-dimensional shapes!
This week in ELA…
Ms. Kim’s group…
Alphas are familiar with digraphs – those consonants that completely change sounds when they are together, but we’d not talked about blends at all until this week; we made blends with the letter “s.”
We came up with loads of blend-words with “s’s” and we honored Justin’s request for “more worksheets please!” with more worksheets to practice them :)
We shared the writing in our journals…
We learned that poets use similes and metaphors to give readers a chance to feel the way they do about the world.
We wrote a group poem about feeling happy…
We are learning an e.e. cummings’ poem during circle time, and in ELA, we are reading a book about this creative poet. Alphas LOVED knowing that poets can break all kinds of writing rules, and they particularly loved learning about e.e. cummings’ tree house! It inspired their writing, too.
So did practicing handwriting using GEL PENS! As did someone’s big idea to write letters to Larry the Leprechaun to let him know that AHB moved to Dartmouth. They asked Ms. Emma to drop them off at the old location since she lives right by it. Ms. Kim hopes that we WON’T need to explain much about Larry this year – but she IS worried that these letters could have a very disruptive effect on our classroom if Larry actually gets them…
Scarlet and Reeder regaled the Alphas with how we set Larry Traps, but only managed to get his boot. It got stuck in one of the kids’ traps. While we didn’t get that pot of gold we hoped for, Larry did leave a lot of gold-covered chocolate coins.
Ms. Emma’s group…
Explored concrete poems! We had fun coming up with designs for these shape poems, and even used our bodies as a template. Lots of hand and feet poems…
We had a spelling check in…
And felt very inspired to create after seeing Larry’s boot….
We also played a round of synonym bingo, learned about a few new glued sounds, shared our P&P poems, and added more high-frequency words to our list.
In Other News…
Happy Birthday, Ezra!!! The Alphas love playing with you, and love cupcakes!
Happy Birthday, Adeline!!! The Alphas know how special you are and loved the ice cream! What a treat!
