Brummitt's High Ability Blog Spot: Rain Rain Go Away!!

April sure is an exciting month here at Brummitt. Monday we had the Book Bowl where the Purple Pandas Riding Dragons won by 100 points over the other 4^th grade team.

They will move forward to compete at the Duneland District Book Bowl on April 16^th. Good Luck to our awesome team!
See the very end of this post for more photos from the bowl. April showers are making it gloomy out this week, but at least it isn’t snowing.

Students’ spirits are high looking forward to all the fun that is planned this month. This week was the kindergarten round-up on Thursday. It looks like there was a good turn out with lots of excited children who are looking forward to starting school this fall.

We are still working on our Life Skills and this week we are working on Flexibility and Sense of Humor. Students are very flexible with each other when they work in teams and make sure that everyone gets want they need to succeed in the group.

With a sense of humor I think they are great at it, but they just have to remember when it is appropriate and when it isn’t. I think they are starting to understand when it is ok to use humor to help the situation and when it is best not to use it. The students work great together in all the classes and have so much fun with each other. I am so glad to have such a great group of kids.

They always know when to make me laugh and they are all great at being flexible. Here are a few pictures of the Life Skills winners for March. These students were elected by other students for showing awesome life skills. I drew their names randomly out and they are some of our March winners.

This month we have so much planned. All of the Language Arts students will start the post assessments. In the beginning of the year the students in first grade through fourth grade completed pre-assessment exams to see what they already knew. This was part of the New Curriculum that we are using from the Indiana Department of Education for Language Arts. It is working great. I think the students really love the new curriculum. Since the year is coming to a close we need to have them complete the post assessments covering what they learned throughout the year. The students will only take the parts of the assessment that we covered during the year. Since we only see the Language Arts students twice a week we didn’t get to complete all of the curriculum, so we won’t be testing them on parts we didn’t cover. I look forward to seeing how much they have learned this year. I will try not to give them too much testing at a time since they will be completing so many other exams in their regular classes. We will try to complete some here and there to also give them fun days too. This week was a great one and I look forward to all the exciting things planned this month.

Language Arts:

Kindergarten:

This week we continued working on connections. The students got to finish up their pictures of connections. They both chose to draw connections they make outside. They loved it. They did a great job explaining their pictures and the connections they made.

We also discussed different types of connections: intellectual, physical, emotional, or social. We discussed why connections are important and how there can be more than one type.

We also completed a comparison of types of connections in a school and classroom. The students came up with some interesting connections and they found that most overlapped between a school and classroom.

On Tuesday we dug deeper into connections and watched a book video on Knuffle Bunny. https://www.
youtube.com
/watch?v=
YScgE3neat
Y&index=3&list=
PLTDRHuGHQa_
5vLiZIRWxQv
NxuqW7wb82w

The students really liked the book. We started to talk about all the connections we can make in the book but ran out of time. We will pick up there next week. We will also reread the book and talk about different levels of questioning.

First Grade:

This week we continued our quest to learn more about hieroglyphs and all that ancient Egypt has to teach us. We reviewed the end of Hieroglyphs from A to Z by Peter Der Manuelian. We went over the questions we have about hieroglyphs and what we want to learn.

We started the class with a puzzle to decipher and the students love it. They had to solve the riddle, Why did the mummy go to the doctor?
So make sure you ask them what they decoded. We also started reading the book: Hieroglyphs by Joyce Milton. This book is broken down into sections and each section covers an important topic about hieroglyphs, their history and ancient Egypt. We read a few sections and then discussed what we read.

The students each got to take turns reading and they did an excellent job. They really enjoyed discussing why and how the hieroglyphs were created and why the language was so different from ours. On Tuesday the students chose a hieroglyph to represent them and drew it in their workbook (with the help of the stencil we have).

Next week they will have to write about how this hieroglyph is connected to them and why. Next week we will continue with hieroglyphs and start some of the post assessments.

Second Grade:

This week we decided to work on comparing characters from the two books we completed The Tale of Despereaux and The Journey of Edward and The Tale of Despereaux. We used a Venn diagram to compare two of the happier brighter characters, first Princess Pea and Abilene. This gave us a chance to talk about both books and how each book had some characters that were very similar and how some characters were not even able to be compared. We found that Princess Pea and Abilene were both very kind, caring, and loving characters, but they both saw the world in very different ways.

It was a great experience trying to describe and analyze both stories and all the characters and how they influenced the book. We also discussed the author since Kate DiCamillo wrote both books. We talked about why she might have chosen to write a hero journey for Despereaux. Tuseday we chose two “evil” or “mean” characters to compare. Botticelli and Lucius Clarke were the two we decided to compare. These two were much harder to breakdown and compare.

They both weren’t good but they were on different levels of bad. They were both very complex. It made us work even harder to find similarities. Next week we will start the post assessments and finish up comparing the books.

Third Grade:

This week we didn’t get to meet on Monday because all the students and I got to watch the 4^th Grade Book Bowl. It was quite a matchup between the two teams. The third grade students were really excited to watch since next year they will have the opportunity to participate in the bowl. On Tuesday we worked more on Alice in Wonderland. The students wrote in their journals about what part of the book was their favorite and why. We also started to work on a really cool crossword puzzle.

Next week we will continue to work on Alice and start some of the post assessments. For Alice we will start a plot map so the students can compare the movie in weeks to come.

Fourth Grade:

This week we continued to read our mystery novel The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity: The Brixton Brothers. Student answered some questions in their journals and made some great predictions of what they think will happen next. The students were asked about a character call Mackintosh and if he could be trusted. They also got to read some pretty exciting stuff. They will be exploring the life of a detective and if they think Steve is just a natural born detective or if he has to work at his skills after all he is only twelve.

The students got to learn about a secret society of Librarians that protect all of the United States secrets since Washington’s time. They also got to read about a cool quilt that held all the secrets called The Maguffin Quilt since then. Now this is fiction, but the students still are wondering could any of this really happen.

We will keep reading to see what happens next and how Steve gets out of the pickle he has gotten himself into. Also can he break the code and find the quilt before Mr. E does? Next week we will also be starting some of the post assessments.

Math:

Kindergarten:

This week we continued to work on graphing. On Wednesday students completed a worksheet together about their birthdays and they filled out the graph for each student and included my birthday as well. Students got to learn how to color in a graph for each person. We also completed a class graph on the whiteboard.

Students decided which ball park/ movie theater foods were their favorite and got to go up and fill it in. Then we counted each food and compared to see which won the best food. Student also got to make a second choice to see how the graph will change with more data.

On Thursday the students completed a favorite color graph and tally sheet. They also got to add and subtract certain colors to find the answer. Our graph of the day was “What is your favorite fruit?” Well I do believe apples won out today.

Next week we will continue to work on graphs and introduce a few new concepts.

First Grade:

This week we worked on volume and learned about gallon man. We also got to watch an awesome video teaching us all about how things measure up to the three gallon gang: https://www.youtube.com

/watch?v=E4UC_StFhAk

We completed a few worksheets discussing liters, pints, cups, and so on. It was fun to figure out each problem to make sure we had the correct amount of pints for 2 liters. On Thursday we finished up on volume and completed the gallon man coloring project.

We had a little time at the end so we worked more on our math facts with junk pile. She did pretty great. One first place and one second place. Next week we will continue to work on volume and introduce weight.

Second Grade:

This week we worked on more math patterns and finished up with Pascal’s Triangle. We moved on to the Magic Triangle and Magic Hexagon. We also started the Latin Square. Here is a website that explains the Magic Triangle:

http://www.learn-with-math-games.

com/triangle-puzzles.html .

The Magic Hexagon was developed by Ernst Von Haselberg in 1887. Here is some information on it: http://mathworld.wolfram.

com/MagicHexagon.html Next week we will continue working on math patterns with more on The Latin Square and Sudoku.

Third Grade:

This week we continued work on decimals. The students got to work in teams to complete the worksheet. They had a great time helping each other complete the addition and subtraction with decimals.

The first team to complete the sheet correctly got to collect a prize out of the prize box. Our winners choose wisely.

Thursday we didn’t get to meet because the third grade had a special presentation on trees.

Next week we will continue to work on decimals and we will also start to work on division to see what they already ready know and what they want to learn.

Fourth Grade:

This week we started learn more about Order of Operations. Since it is a new concept for some of our students I wanted make it something fun to learn. We watched a few videos explaining and an awesome video to help the students remember PEMDAS. Here are all the links:

https://www.khanacademy.

org/math/

cc-seventh-grade-

math/cc-7th-negative-

numbers-multiply-and-

divide/cc-7th-order-

of-operations/v/introduction-to-order-

of-operations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAgfnK528RA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zanq7gmXY88
On Thursday the students were so excited to see the music video again we watched it one more time. Then students started to work on the first side of the worksheet where it is essential that they know the order of operations to complete it properly. Some students worked alone while others worked in pairs to see if they understood all they had learned. I am very pleased with all they have learned so far. Next week we will continue with order of operations.