Fall Break Friday

 Happy Fall Break Friday!

The weather is definitely getting cooler and feels more like winter.... .Luckily for us it is warn and dry in our classroom so we can learn lots of new things.

This week in Language Arts....

First graders continued learning pig latin. We learned the pig latin song, and practiced writing words like computer, desk, and chair in pig latin to make sure we understood how it works!
On Tuesday, we learned about persuasive writing, and how it can help you convince other people to do what you want.  I introduced the hamburger model for writing, explaining that we would put all of our ideas down and the model will help us sandwich them into a paragraph.

The hamburger model is made up of an Introduction, followed by three reasons, and ends with a conclusion. It was quite funny when they learned the word conclusion; they thought we were saying confusion. This led to "why is there confusion in our paragraphs?" It was a fun time, and I finally got them to understand the word and what it means.  It is always an adventure in first grade! Or should I say Irstfay adegray?
Next week we will write our own persuasive paragraphs using out model from today to help us and then we will learn some editing, and grade our papers.

Second  graders worked on reviewing the eight parts of speech. We analyzed a sentence from our novel, and marked the words as the parts of speech. We learned a lot about prepositions, and that they can make a prepositional phrase.  We listened to the song about prepositions and tried to sing along. We will continue to analyze sentences and review our parts of speech as we move through the novel.  The students picked it up pretty quickly without much review of what each part of speech does.
On Tuesday we worked on Paul's reasoning wheel. The wheel helps us to be active thinkers while we are reading. Sometimes we have to use our schema and make inferences while reading. The wheel helps is think about the following :                  

-purpose?
-evidence or data
-assumptions
-point of view
-concepts
-consequences
-inferences
We then practiced their questioning and inferencing skills by listening to a chapter and writing question son sticky notes. We then read our questions aloud and posted them on our focus wall. 


Third graders were busy learning about pet interactions and how they are positive or negative. We are going to be moving on to a new lesson  where students will learn how to fill out and use a reading analyzer while reading some classic literature by Beatrix Potter. We will be learning about the author's interactions with nature and animals and her love of drawing and her vivid imagination.

Fourth graders got a good start on reading and starting their summary sheets for the Biography project. I shared the timeline and due dates for the project last week Please let me know if you did not receive them.  They were sent in a google format. The students received the past two days to get started on their assignment. From here on out, I will be teaching and they will have to do their reading and other work at home.  I will keep you posted with due dates.


Due to shortened week I will not be posting word nerd or brain squeezer questions this week. Check back next week for another challenge!

Math News

The first graders continued working on recognizing vertices and sides of polygons, as well as making new shapes. We played GRUPO this week! Grupo is a card game that helps the students match shape cards by four like attributes. Some have the same sides, vertices, inside shapes, or are the same shape. Students have to tell the four things that the shapes have in common in order to pick up the pair. We started learning the rules and we actually ran through a quick game on Wednesday. We played another game on Thursday, to help reinforce this skill. 
 


Second graders worked on making new shapes from congruent triangles. We made squares, rectangles, triangles and parallelograms!   The kids struggled at first getting the shapes to match and make a shape, but they started to understand how to do it after a couple of tries.   We also started talking about the purpose of writing in our Math lessons. It is important that the students write in math to prove the validity of their answers to the other students, The steps  in the  writing process is to THINK, about the question, TALK about the answer, TELL all ideas and the answer and then tell why. These steps lead to a greater understanding of the material.

Third graders were working in small group with their THINK and BEYOND cards this week. First they had to solve the problem in a small group.  Then they worked on the Awesome Algebra game cards to make their own problems like on the think and beyond, They had to write the question, solve the problem, and then give their problem to another student in their area to solve.

Fourth graders worked on making origami frogs for a bit of class. We then continued to work on making our longs fraction strips for helping us solve the frolicking frogs questions. Our origami creations were not hard at all for Alex, who swore that he was not good at origami! It proved somewhat difficult for the rest
 of us. Thank goodness he was willing to help his friends (and teacher).

   


Thank you so much for the donations of tissues and baggies. We will be set for a while. I appreciate your generosity!

Have a wonderful Fall Break! My family will be camping at the Dunes this weekend for trick or treating. Come on out and join the fun! Trick or treating starts at 4:30 I believe.  Lots of fun activities for the kids and family. I would love to see some of the cool costumes the kids have been telling me about.

Also, here are the crazy hat and sock day pics from our class!

 

 

 

 

Have a wonderful fall break!

 

Mrs. P