Brummitt's High Ability Blog Spot: Flurrying Friday

BRRR.......the weather is cold this morning!

I am ready to hibernate with all this cold weather-how about you? It looks like the cold weather is here to stay, although we are in Indiana, so who really knows for sure?

We are happy to be back at school after a couple nice long weekends. We have jumped right back into learning mode, and all groups are ready to go Technical problems persist! Although I was able to take photos this week, I have been unable to get them to upload... as soon as I can get them up on the blog I will send out a reminder to let you . know. Sorry for the inconvenience.

First grade language arts learned a new cipher this week called the over and under cipher. They had another secret code to crack...this one said Hip Hip Hooray for the alphabet! The kids really enjoy solving the codes and learning to use the different ciphers. It became a race between two of them every time.

We read the story The Disappearing Alphabet by Richard Wilbur. It was a fun and silly book talking about the fate of things if the letters of the alphabet started disappearing. For example, you would have to say NO to ice cream and desserts if the letter Y disappeared because you could not say yes. The funniest part was when the owls would have to wear wigs! We then filled out a reading analyzer to show how it can help you understand a story or a chapter by breaking it down into pieces. We looked at key words from the story and emotions that we felt as well as how we thought the characters in the story felt. We would be sad if there were no marshmallows, but happy if there were no snakes and spiders.

Making Connections

Second graders in language arts worked on learnng more vocabulary words to help them understand the story. We were interested to see what the words mortified and pneumonia meant. We talked about the point of view of the story and how all the characters have a different point of view. We made connections between Edward and the other characters in the book so far. The kids have all picked up on the fact that Edward has learned to listen to others, not just ignore them. He realizes that he did not treat Abilene as nicely as he could have, and he hopes now that he can find his way back home. He certainly is on quite the journey! He is learning about the people he comes in contact with, as well as he is learning a lot about himself too! The best mind blowing part of our discussion this week when we were talking about Edward's connection to the stars. We talked about how when we go outside at night we are looking at the same stars that people across the world are looking at. Homework is to read chapters 10-13 and complete a reading analyzer for chapter 13. We will be reading the story The Velveteen Rabbit next week and making connections between the two texts.

Third graders have been reading and listening to Beatrix Potter books and analyzing and comparing the texts. I was proud of them for figuring out the hot singy smell was referring to the smell of a hot iron in The tale of Mrs. Tiggy Winkle. They are really picking up on the fact that Ms. Potter's books were all inspired by the woodland creatures she interacted with on a daily basis while growing up. We will finish working in pairs on our reading analyzer for their book pick next week.

Fourth graders spent this week learning more about Paul's reasoning wheel and then working on putting important dates on a timeline. The students will continue to work in class on their summaties for their projects.
Important reminder: CSI test will be given to 4th graders at the end of November. This will be used to identify HA students for 5th grade

Word Nerds:
Unscramble this word: ggnitasivhkn

First grade math:

We put on our thinking caps and turned them up to high so we could do our writing portion of our math lesson. We started by classifying the shapes into groups:
squares, rectangles, triangles, pentagons, hexagons, then we classified all the 4 sided shapes into Quadrilaterals. We then classified all the shapes into 1 group-- Polygons! The kids have really worked hard on this lesson, learning more words and creating new shapes! We then did our think deeply writing sheet. The students got to come up to the white board and write their ideas down while those at their seats wrote on their papers. We finished with out We Understand statement. On Thursday we again played Grupo. only this time we looked for things that our shapes had that were different. They could have different amount of sides, vertices, shapes on the inside....they had fun playing again,but found it was harder to find things that were different between the shapes to make matches.

Second Grade Math:

We worked in stations this week to complete our Think and Beyond cards. We used yarn to make a protractor and check out different angles. They learned about acute, right and obtuse angles. The students had fun moving from station to station. They made triangles for each category and we talked about how an acute angle says " Oh, lookI am a cute little angle!", the right angle says" I am the right angle, straight up!" And the obtuse angle says " I am so big, I am OBTUSE!" The students also had a station to review finding lines of symmetry with a mirror, and a station where they made new shapes from two congruent shapes. There was also a station for those who finished early with a hundreds chart coloring sheet to decorate our classroom door!

Third grade Math:

Third graders started a new lesson on patterning. It is called What's next? The kids enjoyed coming up and adding to our pattern...We started with 3,6,9, and 12. The pattern was to add 3. After getting all the way to 39! Then we moved on to a new pattern. We were going to play with calculators and make patterns, however the calculators were dead and not working, so we improvised and did some fun work with hundreds charts as a preview for our next lesson. We will be getting more calculators and trying again on Wednesday! That just serves as a reminder to always have a back up plan!

Fourth grade Math:

Fourth graders are thinking deeply about the frog jumping competition! We filled out our paperwork to explain the steps we took to arrive at our answer. Then we reviewed how to convert an improper fraction to a mixed number and vice versa, The kids were having difficulty remembering that in converting from a mixed number they divide the bottom number into the top number and make a fraction from the remainder. For an improper fraction they multiply the bottom number and the whole number and then add the top number to make an improper fraction where the fraction is top heavy with the bigger number on top! After some practicing they are all successful!!. Moving on to Think and Beyond cards next week where we will really need our thinking caps!