Happy Monday

    We are having a great Monday! The kids performed a play from Reader’s Theater; each child had a part and did their best. We struggled a little bit with reading our name and then our part but by the end of the practice we got it! It was great practice with reading on the spot in preparation for Wednesday’s presentation.

    For centers we wrote our spelling words in oil pastels, glittered and glued them, colored them in rainbow spelling, and wrote about our weekends.
    We had a successful fire drill this morning. Tonight would be a great night to talk about their recollection of the fire drill and congratulate them on a job well done.

Happy Monday

Our World

I am sure you all have seen the interviews that were sent home and hopefully you had a little bit of fun filling them out! From the interviews we listed where our families emigrated from to America and then we used pins on a soon to be retired globe to show just how far our families have traveled. It was a very special experience and it allowed the children to directly relate to the lesson. We talked about how important family heritage is and how it affects who we are as individuals. We also stressed that while some of us may have had relatives who lived in the same areas of the world we are all special and unique. Here is our globe:

A Penny for Your Thoughts

As an extension of yesterday’s lesson on the statue of liberty and how copper changes over time we looked at a new penny and an older penny under our videoscopes. It was fascinating!

In other news: 

   We are starting to place small flags on the globe where our families have journeyed from to come to America generations before us. Pictures to come!

From Sea to Shining Sea

Today we read “When I Came to This Land” to introduce how people came to America. We talked about Ellis Island and how long and difficult the journey was for people who embarked on it.  We brainstormed how they must have felt on their journey and how hard people worked to build a new life for their family. We studied the meaning of the word fortunate and wrote why we are fortunate in Writer’s Workshop.

    Next, we carefully studied the Statue of Liberty. To fully understand how large the statue is the kids looked at the measurements of certain parts of the statue like her eyes, nose and hands. We then measured our eyes, nose, a fingernail, a finger with a partner and recorded our own measurements. We were amazed at how truly ginormous the Statue of Liberty is in comparison to all of us! Our eyes were all a little over an inch wide whereas Lady Liberty’s eyes are two feet six inches across!!! We did some mental subtraction and scaffolded with white board subtraction where necessary. We then created life size cut outs of Lady Liberty’s nose, fingernail, and eye. It turns out most of us are shorter than her nose. To wrap up the lesson and to double check that we knew how to use the requested measurement on the ruler independently (inches for this study) they each had to cut a six inch eyelash to add to our two and a half foot eye!  The eyelash was their ticket to help hang up the large creations. We made sure we were implicitly clear that the real statue of liberty does not have eyelashes and nor is she made out of paper.

    To tap into the science side of the project we discovered that the statue of liberty is made out of copper and is only as thick as two pennies put together!!! We learned that she looks green from oxidation over time due to nature’s elements. We compared seven pennies with “birth dates” spanning thirty three years and examined their color. We noted the same effect on older pennies that we saw on the Statue of Liberty; a slightly green color! We learned that this greenish color is actually a film called patina. We tapped into our senses and felt the difference between a new copper colored penny and a penny that had the patina film on it. What a fun day!

Tuesday

    Even with the short week we are squeezing a lot of extraordinary things in! Just ask your child the meaning of the word extraordinary. We completed a Frayer model for the word extraordinary. The Frayer model is a type of concept map in which you really dissect a word. The activity helped us to understand what the word means and even further, what it does not. We did a little more work on our David Shannon’s A Bad Case of the Stripes webquest. This was a lot of fun. We made predictions, analyzed characters and their characteristics, and even watched a few video interviews with David Shannon. To introduce into maps and distance we looked up wher David Shannon lives and typed it into MapQuest to see how far he lives from us in miles, how long it would take to drive there, and just to even begin to understand how big the world is around us.

    We have been working on learning the punctuation rap which can be found on the National Punctuation Day website. Each one of the kids sang the part of a particular punctuation mark. Be sure to ask your child what they were in the song!

  We are working on three digit addition and to set ourselves up for success the kids created color coded columns before starting the Singapore math activity. The kids really enjoyed this and since it showcased several levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy (creating, analyzing, applying and understanding) so did I!

   Today we reviewed time telling with Time Telling Bingo! To differentiate some students were given the bingo card that I read from and some used Judy clocks to self-check. They really enjoyed this and there was very little frustration for such a fast paced activity! 

Opposite Day- Not Fun!

For a half day we sure accomplished a whole lot. To introduce synonyms and antonyms we started off our morning as opposite day! We used antonyms when we spoke, wrote our writing with opposite meaning, and had a little fun with it along the way. For the first time this year I actually had to say please talk louder while you do not write for writer’s workshop. When I asked the kids how they liked it they said it was “the worst day of school this year!!!” J

The kids took their spelling tests and created their new spelling cards for next week. We also wrapped up our measurement of the effect of bubbles on the amount of water in each one of the three small containers that had fast, slow, and no air being pumped into them. Their findings looked like this:

What I love this Wednesday:

• ·        The compliment chain we made to remind ourselves to show chesed to one another
• ·         Conferencing with the kids about their goals for their own learning
• ·         Being able to do individualized Zaner Bloser handwriting (FINALLY! J)

What I would love to see by next Wednesday:

• ·         Less of a mess in our desks!
• ·         No more issues at recess
• 
  

Happy Wednesday 

:)