Feel Good Friday

Welcome Back!
I hope everyone had a restful and relaxing long weekend. The weather was so nice, I even got to go to the golf course with my son!  Not many times you can say you golfed over Thanksgiving break!

Well here we are back again in High Ability moving right along.  We have many fun activities this month here at Brummitt as well. Check it out:

Dec.1-7- Food Drive for Westchester food pantry

Dec.7th- Early dismissal at 1:45

Dec. 8th- Angel tree items due.

Dec.9th- Barnes and Noble fundraiser from 9-4 p.m.

Dec.13-20th- .Holiday shop

Dec 14th- PJ Day

Dec. 14th- PTO mtg at 2:30

Dec. 14th- curl up and create in Media

Dec. 21st- holiday parties

Dec. 24- Jan 7th- Holiday Break No School

 

 

Language Arts News

 

 

 First graders started learning about Anagrams this week. Anagrams are words that are made from the same letters,  but are rearranged to make new words. We worked on words with the letters- S, O, P, T. The words that the kids found they could make with these letters are stop, spot, pots, post, opts, and tops.  We are calling this lesson "magical letters" because we are going to be delving down deep and doing lots of hands on activities with letters to learn about all the amazing anagrams that can be made. The kids are excited to learn more about this next week. I had some very disappointed kids when class time was up and we had to quit working for the day. We will be reading a fiction story next week that is filled with 

anagrams. I am  excited to share it with them. We will also listening to a song about Anagrams, I am sure they will have it stuck in their heads. I listened to it the other day and it is a really catchy tune!

 

Second Graders finished up our comparison between The Velveteen Rabbit and our novel . Edward Tulane this week. They did a great job making connections between the main characters in both stories.  We worked more on our parts of speech with another sentence from our novel. The kids are getting better at recognizing certain words as pronouns and adjectives. I love having this group work together in cooperative groups. They all work together nicely, and never leave anyone out.We are nearing the end of our novel. The kids are getting really anxious to find out if Edward makes his way back home.  We will be finishing the book next week in class on Tuesday. Please do not let them read past chapter 23 as assigned this week. I know that several of them have read ahead in the past, but I would really like for everyone to experience the end together.

checking their parts of speech

 

 

 

   Third graders have learned and analyzed a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson this week. We read the poem "The Flowers". We talked about and looked up pictures of the flowers named in the poem. The kids were unsure what Bachelor's buttons and Gardener's Garters were until I showed them the pictures.  This group does well with analyzing poetry and other books.  I also introduced them to Jane Goodall. We watched a short video about her work with chimps in Africa. We discussed her being a naturalist. We looked up the word previously in the dictionary.  We will talk about  the definition of an Activist next week, as well as we will read a portion of her book "My life with Chimpanzees".

 

 

       

  Fourth graders have worked really hard on their summaries and they turned them in on Tuesday at the end of class. I will be going over these with them next week and making more suggestions. We will be working on our works cited pages as well as searching for photos and synthesizing important dates for our timelines. These girls have grit and I enjoy seeing them dig deep for good information.

searching for pictures for Bio

 

 

Math

 

 

making the shape for what happerned

First graders played the game "What Happened". They had to make a shape and see how it was changed by the other team. It could have a shape removed, a shape moved to a new spot, or it could be the same.  The kids picked up on the game quickly after all of our review a couple of weeks ago. We also started on our Think Deeply for this lesson.  The question is "What strategies did you use to play the game?" We first talked about what strategies we use in all game playing. We talked about the game Battleship and what strategies we use to win the game. We then talked about the game we played. "what happened?" and what our strategies were. They were to build the shape to match a grupo card, memorize the shape they created, and to see if the shape was changed or not, and if it was changed was a shape removed, or moved to a new location , or was it not changed at all?

 

Answering our Think Deeply question using out Think Frame

 

 

 Second graders jumped back into our lesson on tessellation or tiling. We reviewed Flips, turns and slides, and then we worked with congruent triangles to practice making designs by turning and sliding these shapes to make a pattern. We had red triangles, and green triangles. We slid the red triangles, while we turned the green the green to make a pattern. We will continue learning about flips, slides, and turns more next week.

 

using sides and turns to create a triangle tesselation

 

 

 

 

Third Graders continued to work on finding patterns in their lesson this week. We used calculators, and then figured out the equation that we can use to solve the problems without the calculators. We worked several examples together on the whiteboard before working individually on a problem. We then regrouped and had a discussion over what questions we asked ourselves when solving these problems. We came up with these questions:

What is the next number in the sequence?

How do the numbers change in the sequence?

What is the pattern doing? Is it increasing or decreasing? Do I need to add or subtract to figure the pattern out?

We will continue to work on problems like this next week to figure out the equation that we can use to solve these problems easier without the use of a calculator. A few of them are getting close to figuring it out, but others are still figuring our the steps we use.

 

 

Fourth graders were only in class for one full day to Math NWEA testing on Wednesday. It was the first class back from Thanksgiving, so we continued to review our addition of fractions. They are struggling a bit with adding fraction with unlike denominators.  We will be moving on next week to our Think and Beyond questions. 

 

 

    Christmas Trivia   

 

For the month of December we will be playing Christmas trivia. It may or may not be Math related, but if you know the correct answer, and turn it in, you will get to pick a prize!

 

If you add up all the gifts that were given in the song "The twelve days of Christmas" how many gifts would you have ?

 

 

Have a wonderful weekend!

 

Mrs.P.