~ FREEZING FRIDAY ~

Happy New Year and Welcome Back!  I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday over winter break. I enjoyed spending the past two weeks with my children. We finally had time to go see a few movies. It was also nice seeing family and friends. However, I was excited to come back and see all my kiddos.  Due to it being a short week, I only met with my Math groups.  

Next week we will start our new monthly theme for the classroom. We are learning from Frozen this month. Just like December we are going to run it as a class this month. We are going to look for what class cooperates and works like a family in the room. Kindness to our classmates will be a BIG focus.

Here is a picture of our winning class from the month of December…

This Class did a great job of working together as a team and following class procedures!

Here are some more of our Student of the Months from November that we are still featuring. These are some of the students that come to class everyday with a positive attitude.  We will have the last of them next week when I see my Language Arts friends…

 

4th Grade Language Arts: Change Makers:
Please make sure you are using this time to continue to work on your project. When we meet next week each child should have two or more pictures of their person cut out. When we meet next week we will make adjustments to the timeline with us missing a week of class.


MATH

1st Grade:  That Covers It - The Target Design Team:  We started class with each person sharing a story from over break...Then it was onto our New Chapter!  Our next big math concept will be on Area.  As an introduction to area, the students needed to figure out which placemat would hold more food on it... a perfect question because Ms. Losinski Loves food!  We took a vote and it turned out to be boys against the girls on which would hold more food.  We used 3x3 post-it notes as our tool to measure the inside of our placemat.  The boys predicted correctly which placemat was larger.  For the remainder of class, the students practiced measuring area with post-its around the room.

    On Thursday, it was time for them to have some more practice at measuring area.  I had some some pre-cut papers for them to predict and measure..  Then we went through a worksheet together.  This time we introduced measuring with a 1 inch tile.  To end the day, each child got a chance to be the teacher and come up to the camera and show a new shape with the tiles.  They loved being the teacher!

2nd Grade:  Length - Car Seats for Egg Passengers:  The kids were super excited to be back in class!  We took a few minutes to let each student share something they did over Winter Recess then it was onto some measurements of our tools for our car seats.  We started by having each student draw a color and this determined who their partner would be for this project.  Then they had a bag of supplies that they worked with for the day.  They first had to make a guess of how long they thought it was in centimeters and then use the ruler to find the actual measurement.  Finally, they took their two numbers and subtracted to find the difference of their two measurements.  It was great walking around to the groups and seeing some of them remember to use their finger nail as a benchmark to use for their estimate.  

On Thursday, we looked over our results from the previous day.  Then we went over all of the rules and requirements for their car seat designs.  The biggest twist is the limits they must follow with the tools they are given.  They can only use a total of 50 centimeters of supplies and each supply has a limit too.  They will submit their plans to Quality Control to make sure they followed these rules!  They used the remainder of class time to begin to draw up their plans with their partner.  Each group had to make a decision of how many egg cartons compartments they wanted in their design by the end of class today...They could choose between 1, 2 or 4.  Next week they will take their plans and build them!

3rd Grade:  Linear Measurement - A Pen for the Yeti’s Pet:

 We took a few moments from class to discuss our winter breaks.  Then it was onto a quick review of our topic - perimeter.  After that we looked back at our problem of taking an 8x20 pen and creating one with different measurements -  smaller than the 20 ft, but they must use all 56 feet of fencing.  We worked through one together as a class and then the kids were ready to try it on their own...this time with great success!  

On Thursday, each student took their turn of coming up in front of the class and being the teacher.  When it was their turn they came to the board and walked us through the steps of how they found their new measurements for their pen.  We will continue working with their pens next week with their Think Deeply Question.

4th Grade:  The Shape of Things - 3-D Shapes Inside Out:  We started this week out with a review of what we learned about or 3D shapes so far.  We went back to the beginning since it had been well over 3 weeks since we last met...After we were caught up for our lesson we switched our focus onto learning about cross-sections.

On Thursday, we filled our set of 3D shapes with water to help us visualize our cross-sections.  This helped us work through our worksheet that had us look at a shape and mark the different cross-sections each shape contained.  When looking for cross sections our in the shapes our focus is visualizing the 2D shape we would see at the plane.  This has helped them when determining what shape we would see.

IMPORTANT DATES:

January 13th: End of Second Quarter

January 16th:  NO SCHOOL Martin Luther King Jr Day

January 20th: Report Cards Available Online
February 1st: Early Dismissal