“What’s Inside Me” this week?… MY CIRCULATORY SYSTEM!
This week, Alphas knew that when they get a scrape or cut, blood comes out – and it’s red, and dries up, and new skin forms under the scab. We learned that blood is made up of a lot of things, like…
…Water! Blood is mostly made out of water…
…and plasma that’s full of nutrients…
…and platelets that mend our skin when we get scrapes and cuts…
…and white blood cells to hunt down germs and bacteria…
…and red blood cells that carry oxygen!!!
We documented our model-building activity, too!
We learned that it circulates, delivering oxygen and nutrients to every part of the body…
Alphas demonstrate “circulating” by traveling around…
Because blood travels in certain directions, it travels in certain blood vessels – like cars travel in lanes, so they don’t crash…
Alphas demonstrate how the walls of blood vessels move blood cells up to the heart by squeezing together to push it forward!
It travels through blood vessels. We learned that once blood makes a delivery, it goes back to the heart to get more oxygen and nutrients, and blood vessels help push the blood back up to the heart!
Arteries are blood vessels that carry freshly oxygenated blood, and veins carry blood back to the heart to get MORE oxygen from the lungs!
We learned a human heart is NOT symmetrical…
We learned that the bigger the squirter, the further the squirt!
We made a diagram of one too!
We learned that the best foods for our heart and blood come from foods that look a lot like they did in nature. We call foods that need a lot of work before we can eat them “processed.” Processed foods can be some of the funnest foods, which are very good for the soul, but they don’t give our bodies the nutrients they need to be healthy.
We learned that our circulatory system has a special clean-up crew called the lymphatic system. This system runs throughout our body through teeny lymph vessels that absorb fat from our blood. Germs, bacteria, and toxins can stick to fat – and when they enter the lymph vessels, they travel through lymph nodes, which live near our most bendy parts. We learned that our lymphatic fluid doesn’t have a lymph-heart to pump it; it circulates through our body when we move! When we squeeze our joints, our lymph gets pumped through our lymph nodes!
Alphas add fat to their lymph…
…we “absorb” fat into our “lymph vessels”…
…then work as a team to send it through the lymph node to filter out the toxins and germs…
In Math…
Ms. Kim’s Mathletes…
…learned about fractals! We practiced adding and accounting for a group of tens, too! Ask your student why Ms Kim didn’t get any photographs of them acting out how the seasons change (an A/B/C/D pattern)…hint: her hands were busy moving the Earth around the Sun.
Ms. Emma’s Math Wizards…
Dived into doubles! We used a graph to track how doubles grow exponentially before playing the “double bubble” game to practice adding up these twin numbers.
White boards served as an effective tool for helping us count out those extra high numbers..
Using a double equation on the board, the students had to solve to move!
4+4=8 jumping jacks!
10+10=20 mountain climbers!
Then we began comparing numbers using greater than, less than, and equal to symbols. The students made some fabulous hungry alligators chomping at the larger numbers…
We ended the week with an addition practice card game
In ELA…
Ms. Kim’s group…
This week, we practiced writing letters f,b,o, and g, and we learned that writers follow certain rules so that people can make sense of the words they write down. When we write thoughts down, they come out in “sentences.” Sentences have structure – They have an uppercase letter when they start, and they have a symbol when they end – like a dot, or a squiggle-dot, or a line-dot, which we call a period, question mark, and exclamation point! We unscrambled sentences using our knowledge of sentence structure to put the words in a sensible order.
We read a fable this week. We learned that before people wrote stories down, they told them to each other. Fables have been around a very long time and have been told by many, many people in many, many different ways – so there are a LOT of different versions of the same story. Several Alphas had already heard the story of The Lion and the Mouse, but theirs was a little different.
OH YEAH…We also read L, M, N, O Peas! We made our own peas that matched our Letter of the Day…
Ms. Emma’s group…
The week began with a new digraph, our “th” sound, which provided a hefty student-created word list…
Playing “dragon race” helped us practice reading our high frequency words..
Then we learned our 5 w’s (what, when, where, who, and why)! We used several stories to identify these new words as a group, before splitting into smaller groups to make our own graphic organizers. Each table team did a fantastic job presenting their findings…
SHAVING CREAM FUN!!!! It always makes writing words extra special…..
In Other News…
This week’s creations…
