Magnets

Here are a few pictures of our unit on magnets. We made our own compass, explored how magnets are so powerful they can pull through water, and built magnetic experiments in centers. 

Bob and Vivienne

Much to our happiness Bob and Vivienne are still swimming and growing beautifully! A large part of having a pet is the responsibility of feeding and cleaning up after it. The kids are great about feeding Bob and Viv four tablets of food twice a week. We recently cleaned the tank together; take a look!

Physics

Here are some pictures of us exploring push and pull. The kids loved seeing the direct relationship between the amount of force exerted on an object and the speed and distance at which it traveled. They are smart cookies!

To check for understanding we made a venn diagram of things that are pushed, pulled, or both.

Blendsday

On Wednesday of every week we add a new blend to our "blender" poster. This causes us to look for that blend everywhere along with the phonics principle. Here are some of our students looking in big books for the "TW" blend!

Tuesday Centers

Well, today the kids exclaimed that it was one of the "most fun centers day ever!" so I would like to take the opportunity to post some pictures!

    To explore why (in first/second grade) we can’t subtract a larger number from a smaller number we explored with dice. We rolled for an initial sum and then wrote that as the minuend. We rolled again for the subtrahend which had to be smaller than the previous number since the subtrahend is subtracted from the minuend. When we saw the equation 4-9=__ we realized we had to roll again to find a lesser subtrahend.

We also used Wiki-sticks to form our spelling words based on our differentiated lists and our phonemic principle 'est'!

Motion Exploration

This week we started our science unit on motion. We discussed pushes and pulls and how they have been all around us without us even realizing it! We explored motion, distance and speed. We wrote new words for our work wall to include: motion, speed, position, push, pull, and friction. We also completed a sort of pictures of everyday activities and glued them under PUSH and PULL headings; this brought up the realization that some things are pushed and pulled. To wrap up the first day of motion exploration we pushed toy cars, rolled Ping-Pong balls, and pulled on springs for authentic exploration (this helped us to see friction in action, which is a very abstract concept). What a fun day!

The Key to Math Is Understanding Numbers

It has been a goal in our classroom to not only understands how numbers work but also what a number really stands for, or its value. We are using different manipulatives to represent numbers and show how in an equation if you change one part of the number sentence you will also influence another. We used keys and number mats and had the keys represent ones, fives, and tens and worked through equations together to see, with tangible objects, how numbers work and what we should see in our minds when we read a math equation.