February Fun Friday

 

Time keeps flying by.... we cannot seem to keep up with all of our activities and field trips as well as testing.  This will be the normal for quite a bit of the spring semester. We have ISTEP testing starting next week. Then we will have CogAt testing for second grade starting March 5th,   which will affect a few weeks in March. When we are in class, we are working hard learning new concepts and challenging ourselves with harder material.

First grade- NO LA class due to Presidents day, and testing.
 

First grade Math- no class on Wed. but on Thursday the students brought their favorite stuffed animals and we sorted them by their attributes such as color, size, shape. We practiced putting like attributes inside our loop and different attributes outside the loop. The students discovered that all of their animals had tails, heads, faces, legs and feet. These attributes went inside the circle, while sizes, colors and types of animals were different and went outside the circle. The students then made their own attribute circles comparing the animals.

Second grade- word clouds and end of novel projects
They only met one day this week, but what a day it was! The students worked on printing word clouds and they finished their end of the novel projects! Thank you so much for all of your assistance with the word cloud assignment! Many hands make small work... We are excited that we will be starting our second novel next week! We are going to be reading The Indian in the Cupboard. by Lynne Banks.   We will be making connections between this novel and our novel about Edward Tulane.  Again, the students will have assigned readings to complete and activities to facilitate learning of vocabulary and comprehension of the material.

Second grade Math-
We started something new this week called Thinking Thursday. Every Thursday I will bring in a challenging math problem for the kids to solve. We will then reveal how to  solve the problem on the whiteboard. We did a practice problem this week and the kids really got into it. They had to listen to the problem, and then we worked as a whole group to decide the important information we needed to solve the problem. We made a graph of the information presented so we could analyze it.  Once we solved our problem, I invited the kids to make their own problem on the board and solve it with a friend. We will continue with our regular math lessons both days,  but I wanted to add some more fun to our week and  to challenge them with more difficult material.

Third Grade - spark learning process
Once we got started, the ideas would not stop flowing! The kids spent the majority of the day brainstorming more ideas and figuring out the parameters of the project. For example, they discussed  if they would need to be at school after school and need teacher supervision, cost of  the venture and of materials, time schedules for classes.  They worked super hard on these ideas! We will continue to work on this next week as well. I would like for them to write a proposal and make a commercial advertising their idea as well.

Third grade math:
We started a new lesson this week called puzzling puzzles. In this lesson the students will learn how to identify patterns and explain them using the order of operations. They will use a hundreds chart and notice how the puzzles fit.  Students only met with me once this week due to ISTEP prep and a field trip.


Fourth grade Language  did not meet due to Presidents day and an author visit. We will complete our presentations this upcoming week and present the following week.

Fourth grade math-
We spent one day doing some challenging math for our Thinking Thursday. These skills also helped the students to prepare for the math portion of the ISTEP test next week. Then we jumped right in to our daddy long legs lesson! Students will explore equivalent fractions using area models, they will also be able to find the area of a rectangle with fractional side lengths. Students used tangrams to recreate a whole square by using just parts. This proved to be difficult for the students....but with a bit of  help, and then a bit more help... they got it right!! So proud of them and their perseverance!

 








Last week for Olympic Trivia

Bring me the names of 5 people who earned gold medals. I would also love to hear what your favorite Olympic sport to watch was, and why.

I hope everyone is able to stay well during this crazy cold and flu season... spring is right around the corner, and I am so ready for it!

Mrs. P