Peaceful Friday

I hope today finds everyone peaceful as the hectic holiday times are fast approaching.  May your upcoming Thanksgiving be filled with laughter, memories and joy.

This week has been a little hectic as I had to miss a day to tend to  my own family. Here is a peek at what we have been up to in High Ability this week!

First graders are learning about word ladders this week . These puzzles were invented by Lewis Carroll ( author of Alice in Wonderland) in 1877 as a Christmas game for two girls
who had nothing to do.  This was following our discussion about the book The Disappearing Alphabet by Robert Wilbur, which was a funny

poetic look at what  would happen if the letters went away.  A word ladder is a sequence of words that each differ from the previous word by replacing some letter in that word with some other letter. For example, the ladder cat → cot → dot → dog is a word ladder that starts at "cat" and ends at "dog.". We are looking at words and making new words by changing one letter at a time. Each new word has to be a REAL word, not just a bunch of letters. This made it tricky at times because we were not sure of the spelling of  the words.  We had several trial and errors as we went. We will continue working on word ladders next week!

Second graders listened to the story The
Velveteen Rabbit.by Margery Williams.This is is a beautiful story about a stuffed bunny who becomes "real" because he is loved by a child. We talked about our "lovies" that we have at home and why they are so special to us. We will be completing a reading analyzer for the story next week, and then comparing and contrasting the story with our Edward Tulane story. We  practiced our parts of speech by analyzing a sentence from the novel. They are really good at recognizing the prepositions and prepositional phrases.

As we near the end of our novel The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, there will be no homework assigned for the long Thanksgiving weekend. We will continue the journey when we return after break. I am eager to see what connections they make between the stories next week. 

Third graders only met once in high ability language due to the fact that I had a sick child to pick up at school, and then I also missed Wednesday to take him to the Dr.
They finished up the Beatrix Potter Reading Analyzers on Monday. All groups did a great job, They all noticed the interactions that Beatrix had with nature as being an important aspect of her literature. We will compare to discuss the Theme, and character traits exhibited in her literary works. We will then be starting a lesson on poetry.

The fourth graders continue to work on researching their person for their Biography project. I am going to extend the work time for the girls to the week after Thanksgiving to complete their summary packets. We have been working hard and diving deep into our books to find out all about our people.  I will be checking with each of them this next week to see where they are exactly in their research.

 

 Due to no  school there will be no HA Math class next week. There was only one day of HA Math this week due to my absence for a sick child.


To all my math families- I hope that you have a wonderful Thanksgiving. I look forward to seeing all of you again next week!


First graders learned about a new game that we will be playing when we return from break. It is called What Happened?
We practiced our skills for the upcoming game by making the shapes that are on the grupo cards and then either moving a piece, removing a piece or leaving it the same. We then had to tell how the shape had changed, or "What happened" to the shape. They did a great job working on this and practicing for our game  the next time we meet.

Second graders started learning about flips, turns, and slides this week. We practiced in class by sliding a crayon box from one side of their desk to the other and back. We flipped the box from front to back and back to front, and finally we turned the box to the side several times until the box made a full circle turn.  We looked at a quilt to see the tessellations. We also looked at pictures of artwork by M.C, Esher that made which is made of tesselations!  The kids are excited to work with pattern blocks and make wall murals! This should be a fun lesson taking us almost into Christmas Break!

Third graders go to use the calculators  to help them figure out a pattern. We used the calculators to enter a number and then just press the equal button and like magic, a new number pops up each time!  The kids had fun working in groups to answer the questions. One group asked if they were allowed to use the calculators to find the answers..... of course! We will continue working on these patterns and figuring out the formula that is used to solve these problems.

Fourth graders worked on addition of fractions with same denominators and then with different denominators. They are  doing great at adding  fractions with the same denominators. We will practice more with the fractions with unlike denominators, before we tackle our think and beyond skills. This skill is new to them as they have not covered it yet in their classrooms. This review will help them to be ahead and have a better understanding when this is introduced in their classrooms. 

Congratulations to Riley for figuring our how old Mr. Albert Einstein would be if he were still alive today! Great job using your noodle!
Due to shortened week there will be no brainteaser for Math this week. Check the blog next week for a new challenge!

There will be a shortened blog edition next week due to the short week. Don't forget to stop in and check out the happenings in High Ability!

Have a restful, wonderful weekend!

Mrs. P