K/1st: Week of Apr 14

When the worlds of Legos and hair clips merge!!!

In our Bigger Backyard…WHAT’S ABOVE US?!

This week we took a tour of the higher layers of our atmosphere discovering why it starts cold in the stratosphere and gets warmer the higher up we go because of all the UV light being captured in the Ozone layer. We talked about how earth’s relationship with the sun gives us life on earth, but how the ozone layer truly makes life possible by blocking the harmful rays from entering our Troposphere. We also discussed how our actions here on earth (cars, aerosols, and other forms of pollution) affect the ozone layer and how we, in kind, need to protect it!

We watched Felix Baumgartner’s record breaking free fall from the stratosphere to get a perspective of how high up it begins. Alphas wanted us to send links to share with you and here they are…

Intro to Felix Baumgartner’s Free Fall (1:30)

The Supersonic Free Fall (3:29)

The Stratosphere is where we see “shooting stars” and we found out how meteorites (space rocks) hit earth’s atmosphere at such high speeds they burn up. Sometimes we call them “fireballs”.

We kept traveling up and uP and UP into the Thermosphere and the Exosphere. We found out the International Space Station (ISS) and satellites orbit in the Thermosphere. We thought about what we would need to live in a space station and we came up with …water, food, oxygen, exercise, bathrooms, gravity helpers, an observation window, and a place to sleep. Our teams then set to work designing their own Space Stations – having a disco could be a fun nodule in a space station! After we created our own Space Stations we viewed a few videos of what life is really like for astronauts.

What Life is Like on the ISS ( a series of short videos)

Sky Blue Team

Orange Team

Green Team

Red Team

Dark Blue Team

In Math…

Ms. Kim’s Mathletes…

This week, Alphas leaned into why we are here and how brains learn. We played games, role-played, and practiced: using our eyes, ears, “and hearts,” (thank you Ace!) to take in new information and ideas, then explore them by putting them into action! We broke up into partners to take a set of numbers and put them into our 99 chart, we put crazy 99 chart puzzles together, we hunted for number patterns in a 99 chart, and we continued practicing ways to break the quantity of 10 into 2 parts.

Alphas experience their parietal lobes learning and adjusting through gross motor practice!

Ms. Eliza’s Math Wizards…

Time keeps on ticking…ticking… counting by fives gets us around the clock easily as we practiced telling time to the :15, :30 and :45 minutes after the hour. We had a partner challenge to see if we could find the 12 ways to make 25 cents, we developed a strategy for how to figure out a difficult Magical Cat Problem that had us sorting into groups (multiplying) adding with double digits and creating a running total AND we made designs with rulers to get familiar with how to hold a ruler down to make straight lines in preparation for the next segment of our measurement unit next week.

In ELA…

Ms. Eliza’s Readers & Writers…

This week we added the CH digraph to our phonics tool chest. We tackled a phonetic exercise listening to and separating c, h, and then ch sounds. We’re finding lots of examples of SH and CH words in our reading.

We wote CH words…

…in our Writing Workshop we wrote about our loveys. We read a couple of books about Yoko, a sweet kindergarten cat, who has challenges with classmates “yucking her yum” and, in another story, takes a beloved family heirloom to school that she was told not to. Both stories created much introspection and connection.

Ms. Kim’s Group…

This week we talked about how fun it is to learn how different things were in the past. We imagined how funny or weird it might sounds to kids in the future to hear that WE love things like “squishmallows” or “gummy worms…” Alphas read William Steig’s When Everybody Wore Hats, which gives us a great view into a child’s life in a big city a long time ago. We also read a biographical story about Frida Kahlo and some precious critters in her life to inspire us to write about a possession we have that is precious to us. We also added “er” controlled words to our spelling practice!