~Blogging on a Monday~

Sorry for the delay - I have been working on uploading the photos from this week and have been having technical issues.

Hope everyone enjoyed the snow this weekend and had a chance to get out and enjoy it!

Around the School

January 21st - Martin Luther King Jr Day -
No School
January 25th - PTO Movie Night
February 14th - Valentine's Day
February 15th - 18th - Mid Winter Break
Class Resumes on February 19th

2nd Grade:  A NEW NOVEL STUDY:  We took some time to go back and focus on some grammar.  The students were introduced to prepositions.  This let us go back and practice identifying the subject in the sentence, as we were answering if it told us where or when the subject did something.  We also took some time to discuss interjections.  They had lots of fun with this one as it allowed us to practice reading with expression.  

We changed gears this week to start to look at some introductory activities to our new novel.  We looked at an activity that has us discuss the idea of light and dark.  This will be a major theme throughout the entire story.  They came up with some amazing discussions and I was excited to see them take this idea to another level before starting the book.  We discussed nocturnal animals, the energy and go, go go during the day verse the quiet and calm at night and how some people have opposite schedules and work at night and sleep during the day.  These were great ideas to discuss prior to our book and I am excited to dig deeper with them as we start the novel.  
We will continue on with the introduction to our novel next week.


3rd Grade:  ANNA SEWELL:  This week the students completed copying their final draft with their persuasive writing.  Then, we moved onto a journal activity.  We first looked at a biography about Anna Sewell, who is the author of our upcoming novel study - Black Beauty. Next, we looked at the writing prompt which asked the students to compare and contrast Jane Goodall and her work to Anna Sewell.  We took a moment to brainstorm some ideas for their response.  Then, they wrote a response in their journal. 
 Next week we will continue with some introduction activities to their novel.



4th Grade:  IT'S A MYSTERY:  We have started to prepare for our upcoming novel study.  The students have been introduced to our genre - a mystery.  We looked at some important vocabulary we will see and need to know as we work our way through the novel to solve the mystery.  Next, we started to practice our detective skills as we worked our way through a mystery activity.  Through different logic puzzles the children are working  to solve a mini-mystery.  This is introducing them to our terms of suspects, opportunity, motive and alibi, and clues.  We have narrowed the list of suspects from 8 to 4 and will solve the mystery next week.

2nd Grade:  THINK DEEPLY:  The students worked with their scale models of our tent to discover how many people can fit into are area.  We also looked at the open space remaining after finding our solutions to how many sleeping bags can fit.  This led us into a discussion that although there was more than 18 square feet remaining why could we only fit 1 person in the tent.  We discussed that although there might be enough area remaining in theory, the shape of the space might not allow more people into the tent.  The students discovered that although there might be enough room, they must also decide if the shape allows for the bags to fit properly without overlapping.

  This led them into their Think Deeply question from Dru and Teller.  They had to decide a disagreement between Dru and Teller.  Dru looked at the numbers and said four people can fit in the tent with room to spare and Teller said using the scale who could not fit that many without the bags overlapping.  The students discovered that Teller was correct and explained their thinking to them. 
 We will move onto the next lesson next week.

3rd Grade:  THINK DEEPLY: We wrapped up finding the area of our bodies.  This led us into our final discussion as we prepared for our Think Deeply.  The students were asked to describe a strategy for finding an estimate and explain the steps to finding the area of an irregular shape.  Together, we reviewed some strategies to find an estimate.  This led us to look at our first estimate and discuss if we made an estimate or a guess.  When we make an estimate we want to use some knowledge with a benchmark or guide to help us come up with a number we hope will be close to the final answer.  A guess would be just stating any random number.  A good strategy would be finding the number of squares in the most consistent row and multiplying it by the number of columns there are to the length of the shape.  We tested this theory out with the shape and this would have given us an estimate of 570 square inches.  This was much closer to our final number of 671 square inches than their first guesses.  

Then, we listed the steps to finding the area of an irregular shape.  We had several strategies to count the partial squares.  Each with different benefits one might save us on time and the other would get us closer to an actual number.  However, both strategies would not let our final answer be exact.   They took our notes from discussion and turned it into their response for their Think Deeply.

4th Grade:  FRACTIONS:  This week we continued on our journey on dividing a whole unit into different sizes and discussing what portion of the whole they represented.  We started an activity that would have us look at the front page of a newspaper cover.  We would want the main article to cover a large portion of the page, with a few feature articles covering different portions.  This was a challenge for them at first because we discussed how since time has changed they might not see a newspaper as often. The students reminded me that everything is digital now - so they were struggling with the end goal of this project.  

They were given 4 fractions with different denominators and were challenged with finding the missing fraction of the 5th fraction - the main article.  This involved multiple steps to solve the problem.  First, they had to find the common denominator of a set of fractions.  Then, they needed to rename the fractions with the new denominator - creating equivalent fractions.  From there they were able to add up the fractions and then subtract from our whole number to find the missing fraction.  This gave them the fraction of 12/36.  This was a perfect opportunity to discuss reducing fractions or looking for the simplest form.  After reducing our fraction, they saw the main article took up 1/3 of the front page.  To end the lesson, the students needed to divide a paper into the fractions given of 1/3, 1/4, 1/9, 2/9 and 1/12 making their own front cover to the newspaper.

  Next week the students will complete their chapter check-up.

Hope you enjoyed the 3 day weekend,

Ms. Losinski