Larry was here…
and we must have nearly caught him because he was so hurried he lost one of his shoes and some of his gold! Ms. Eliza was a little disappointed when we discovered it wasn’t real gold, but chocolate instead.
We all agreed it was a great treasure nonetheless!
This week Around the World in 60 Days…
We found out that it was just 60 years ago that humans saw the earth from space in photographs taken by astronauts. It gave us a whole different perspective of the land and oceans we all share. We learned some of the different forms that land takes and recreated them.
We then discussed the difference between weather and climate and how climate affects the type of resources the land will have. How we live is determined by our resources which are different around the world. We drew climate zones on maps to understand how they move in a symmetrical way north and west of the equator.
We found out that the land around the globe used to be one super continent and now it’s divided into 7 continents. Each continent will be the focus of our study this quarter and we prepared our globes by painting the ocean.
This week in Math…
Ms. Kim’s group…
This quarter we will be exploring many things related to place value, including digit placement, operations and number sense. This week, instead of filling out our calendar with numbers, we filled it out by drawing in ten bars and unit cubes! We are keeping our computational skills honed with some addition work (finding all the combinations that make 10), and have begun the task of building our hundred chart – starting with the 10’s column!
Ms. Eliza’s group…
This week we were breaking things apart into a fraction of the whole.
We started with figuring out how to divide chocolate chip cookies evenly so that each of us could share just 2 cookies (they were delicious!). We worked together on determining equal and unequal parts and then we each donated one of our shoes to place into a group and decided what fraction of them were new shoes, tie shoes, buckle shoes etc. We also took a close look at dry and liquid measures to see how they, too, break down into fractions.
This week in Language Arts…
Ms. Eliza’s group…
We’ve discovered that we have so many of our own stories to share. Writing them is our focus this quarter. We started with thinking about places we’ve traveled to or places that we like to go…
And then we thought about how to write about one in simple sentences.
We were inspired this week by 2 wonderful books about memory collectors
And are collecting our own memories to write about next week!
In our study of phonics we’re learning about blends and have started with
s blends added to cvc words. We take time to read to ourselves or with
a partner everyday. Our skills are growing!
Ms. Kim’s group…
We will be writing personal narratives throughout this quarter using the information they bring in from their projects and practice. We will be reading biographies and memoirs to inspire us.
This week we read a biography about Jaques Cousteau and a memoir about a fantasy-town called Roxaboxen that the author’s mother created with her friends when they were little. We exercised our creative autonomy by writing an imaginative piece about being in charge of the world. We had some great ideas from “getting rid of bombs and war,” to “Estelle’s hairbrush,” “lost dogs,” and ”daddy longlegs.” They were eager to create a world that included “no limits on screen-time,” “beaches everywhere,” and “fairies.”
We read with our reading groups and we worked to identify and use the homonyms they’re, there, and their (the clues are in the spelling they’re: a contraction, t”here”: direction, and t “heir”; is about inheritance/ownership). We also introduced “r-controlled” words.
In other news…
Sharing new books…
Meeting our new quarter 4 table mates! We Barnyard Babbled, and got to know our mates playing “Two Truths and a Lie!” The students easily picked out Ms. Kim’s lie – no she didn’t have 1 million dollars, as Leo pointed out “…if she did, there’d be a lot more upgrades here.”
Demonstrating Jijitsu moves…
And being inspired by Leprechaun magic…
