~FALL FEST FRIDAY~

Weekly Quote

Another week has flown bye!  This week in class we focused on leadership.  What it means to be a leader and ways to be one in the classroom.  I have asked them to look around the room the next few weeks to see if they can identify who is a leader in the room.

The school is still continuing to have a contest in raising plastic bottle caps – please continue to support this effort!  It is exciting to walk around the school and see the bags overflowing by each class!  Tonight is also Fall Fest at the school from 5-7pm come on by for some family fun!

LANGUAGE ARTS

1^st Grade:  Caesar Cipher – Cryptographic Connections:  On Monday, we walked through each of the shields the children presented for their coat of arms project and filled out our rubirc.  It really helped them learn more about a rubric and help them understand connections further.  The children and I discussed creativity and were excited to see how each student tried to think of clever ways to illustrate their drawings without giving away what the connection.

On Tuesday, we started our new unit.  We are continuing our focus on symbols with our language and looking at secret messages.   We introduced this topic by looking at a message that was in code and asked the students what it meant.  After a few minutes we shared our ideas.  Then they were explained the message is in a code and asked for ideas we could decode it – one example they had was to turn the paper upside down and another student tried to read the message through the paper.  Then they were asked why people might not want someone to know their secret message.  The children learned the Caesar Cypher method has been used for thousands of years to not let their enemies know their secret plan!  At the end of class we built our own cipher wheels and learned how to use them.  Next week we will practice deciphering codes with our wheels!

2^nd Grade:  The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane:  On Monday, some children needed a few extra minutes to finish up and turn in their practice analyzer from the prior week.   Then we went into a discussion on predictions.  The children knew it was a guess, but we focused on the phrase “educated guess” and using information we know or see to help guide us in our predictions.  I introduced them to the book The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane and explained they we will be exploring this book as our novel study in class.  I asked the children from just the cover what we could use to help us make our educated guesses – we came up with the picture on the cover and the title could be our clues.

On Tuesday, the children came in and we started a set of 7 questions we are making predictions before we open the book.  Using our two clues we came up with from the previous days we were able to work through the first 4 questions.  It was great to see them incorporate the words in the title into the predictions.  They were using their clues!  We will continue with our questions on Monday. 

There may be some days the book may be sent home and the children may be asked to read a chapter or two on their own please make sure this is being completed at home so they can participate in the discussion the following day.  I will send an email if they are asked to complete it at home so you are aware if it was assigned.  Thanks for your support!

3^rd Grade:  Myths and Legends – Grammar:  On Monday, we finished highlighting and identifying nouns in “Iduna and her Apples.”  As added practice, after reading it I allowed for a quick retell to see what we remembered from the week before!  We then turned our focus to nouns and answering the question - can a sentence have more than one noun in it?  Our answer was yes, but then the thought changed to no after we first identified the subject.  We looked further at our sentence and found another noun in it and had to figure out what its purpose was in our sentence.  At the end of class we introduced prepositions and identified the object of the preposition as our other noun.

On Tuesday, we looked at our list of prepositions further to help us identify them in a sentence.  I shared three fun videos with the children to help in this process.  The first video taught the song to help them memorize them and the second was a School House Rock video to help.   After the video we used some silly Halloween sentences to practice labeling the words and diagraming sentences.  They enjoyed working on the write board and taking on the teaching role to explain the sentence!

4^th Grade:  My groups did not meet this week because of the field trip to Camp Goodfellow.

MATH

1^st Grade:  It’s Heavy:  Heavier or Lighter:  On Wednesday, we started off with a brief reminder of the fax we are investigating for our friends.  As the children explained what they remembered I introduced our new math vocabulary: weight, heavier, lighter and about the same.  I will continue to encourage them to use these new terms throughout the unit.  We had so much fun using our animal friends Imi and Zani sent us to practice with a seesaw.  Each student took turns coming up showing me different ways to display about the same, heavier and lighter with our animal friends.  Then they were up for the challenge!  After a brief discussion on if the gorilla or hippo was heavier and we concluded as a class the hippo.  The hippo was placed on the seesaw and just like our story Just a Little Bit more the children had to help the hippo lift up on the seesaw.  It was a great team effort!  They reviewed the lesson with a worksheet they completed on their own.

On Thursday, we had to brainstorm some ideas that Imi and Zani could use as a seesaw, but to downsize it for the measuring fair.  The kids talked about having using a board and turning over our recycling bin.  That was a great idea, but I asked them to think of a way we could make it even smaller for them.  We then came up with using a ruler as our board for the seesaw.  Then the students worked on another set of worksheets on weight – this time introducing the term about the same.  There also was a twist in this sheet as all the objects were a present, but had different designs so they had to think about the pictures a little more with this project.  We will continue experimenting with weight next week!

2^nd Grade:  Length:  Marble Crash Test:  On Wednesday, we reviewed over our Prickly Practice –Half Inch measuring sheet.  We took a few minutes to discuss if a measurement is between two marks how to decide to round it up or down.  This part I could see made it a little trickier for them.  They practiced this with the rounding skill added in on a new worksheet. 

On Thursday, we went over the worksheet as a class.  Some students were still struggling with rounding to the nearest tally mark.  To help work through it students would come up and show the class how they reached their measurement.  Everyone ended up getting a turn to come up and if a student still disagreed with the answer they would come up and we would let them figure it out with the class.  This took a little extra time, but was allowing them to fix their learning while adding in the rounding.  As a special note this week, this group worked hard the entire week and I am super proud of how they stayed on task the entire time.  They were all ROCKSTARS this week and thinking like great mathematicians!

3^rd Grade:  Linear Measurement:  Measuring Me:  On Wednesday, the students continued the investigation phase of incredible me.  They broke off into their groups again and finished through their worksheet.  It was great to see them coming up with better estimates as they worked through the sheet.  At the end of the investigation – it flipped around the game and gave them an estimate and they had to guess a body part to measure they thought fit the measurement given.  It was great to see them think what about what they learned so far to complete this new task!

On Thursday, we came back together as a class to share what we learned in our investigation.  This is how our math book will work throughout the year: the children will be introduced to a topic, work through an investigation to explore the new material, come back together as a class to discuss what we learned and then end with summarizing the lesson on their own.  In our class discussion we talked about figuring out a good measuring bench mark to use as a tool to help in making an estimate.  This will help them as we continue to work with measurements in this chapter.

  Please remember a few students still need to turn in their Hunt for Capacity paper.  As these are completed please send them back in.  If possible please send in the bottles you used so the class can use them to study capacity at a later time.

4^th Grade:  The Shape of Things:  You Either Have it or You Don’t:  On Wednesday, we continued examining shapes one at a time and defining their math attributes.  They looked closely at parallelograms and rectangles and described each of their attributes. We were able to revisit a statement made on our introduction day that all squares are rectangles.  We then flipped the statement around and I asked the students if all rectangles are squares.  This made some of them say a square is not a rectangle so we looked closely at the defintions and safely concluded that all squares are a special rectangle, but not all rectangles are a square.  It was great to revisit this statement a student made earlier and help them clarify their understanding of the two terms. 

On Thursday, we continued through or exploration of shapes and defined a rhombi, square, and trapezoid.  At the end of the day the students worked through their notes and started to make their own definition for each shape in their student journals.  We will continue with our student definitions next week.

IMPORTANT DATES:

October 14^th: Fall Fest 5-7pm

October 20^th: End of First Grading Period

October 21^st: Fall Recess- No School

October 28^th: Fall Parties

November 2^nd:  Early Dismissal – Parent/Teacher Conference

November 3^rd:  Early Dismissal – Parent/Teacher Conference

November 4^th:  No School