~Falling Temperature Friday~
Can you believe it - we are just days away from Winter Break! This week we will end our challenge on Teamwork in the room. As we are reaching a halfway point to the school year, it was perfect timing for us to have a few reminders on working well with others. These past two weeks I have seen great effort from all of my classes to work hard together as a group and not just an individual.
We do not have a weekly quote for next week because of it only being 2 days and not all my groups will see it. We will continue with our monthly theme next month when we return from break. Check back next week to see a hint of our new theme for the month.
Happening Around the School: Tonight Yost will be hosting its Winter Wonderland. The cost for admission is $3.00 - admission includes the activities of cookie decorating, reindeer food and pictures with Santa. For an additional cost you may visit Santa’s Secret Shop and do a little shopping with your children. They will also have food available to purchase if you are hungry. Bring the whole family for a fun time in Winter Wonderland!
Next week, I will only see my Language Arts groups - so I wanted to wish my Math Groups a Happy Holidays!
I hope you enjoy winter break and I will see you next year!
Our Class of the Month is…
2nd Grade Math
All of my classes did a great job with this challenge. 3rd Grade Math and 1st Grade Math tied for second and 3rd place finishing one point behind the winning class.
Below, you will also see some of our students that were the Character of the Month for November. These students are always optimistic and enter the room with a positive attitude. They motivate the entire class to keep trying or simply bring a smile to our faces with their great attitude!
Next week I will have the rest of our Character of the Months...
LANGUAGE ARTS
1st Grade: : Alphabet Acrobats - Magical Connections: This week we introduced a new term to the students - Magical Anagrams. We took our four letters from last week - P, T, S,O - and I allowed each student to come to the board and arrange them with the word they made. Then as a class we worked towards finding the other 3 words we could arrange with the letters. This was an introduction to our new term of anagrams. We looked at a few more examples as a class and then read the story - The Great Show and Tell Disaster. In this book the author Mike Reiss uses anagrams to write a silly story. The children really enjoyed this book.
On Tuesday, we started with a class discussion from our story. We looked back at the text and noticed what the author did special to the text so the anagrams stood out - capitalizing them. We also looked back at a few of the illustrations and discussed how the illustrator added to the anagrams. To end the day, the children were given a set of the alphabet letters and worked through some anagrams in their student journals.
2nd Grade: Text to Text Connections - The Velveteen Rabbit: On Monday we briefly discussed what has happened in our story from last week. Then the children listened to the remainder of The Velveteen Rabbit. Afterwards, we discussed what happened in the story and focused our discussion on the “nursery magic” and a toy becoming Real. We also learned that the author will sometimes add a special text feature to have the reader focus on a part in the story. In the Velveteen Rabbit the author always capitalized the word Real to have our reader focus in on this key part of the story.
Then we changed our focus to the lesson for the week - making a text-to-text connection. We reminded ourselves of some of the connections we have seen so far and then thought about what a text-to-text connection might mean...This led us into our project this week - we made a Venn diagram with The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane and The Velveteen Rabbit.
By drawing names, we split the class into two groups - each one focusing on one part of our two stories. Then they were asked to use sticky notes to write about the characters, setting and plot of each story. Each group came forward and added their notes. Next, we looked at what we could pull off from each side that was similar and moved those notes to the middle of our diagram. To end the day, we used our Venn diagram to compare and contrast the two stories together as a class.
We will now move our focus back to Edward Tulane and the children were asked to read chapters 14-16 by next Monday.
3rd Grade: Fairy Tales: We started this week by looking at the different elements that make up a fairy tale. Then it was time for the students to explore their own story. Each student picked a story to read and they will present it to the class.
On Tuesday, the students continued with their readings. We started to look closer at one of the stories as they had a few questions about the events in the story. This week was a short week for this group because we had students missing for part of each class. Next week the students will analyze their story and share it with the class
4th Grade: Change Makers: We are onto our final week for the Biography Summary. I was happy to see that most of the students are just adding finishing details into their papers. I mentioned to them to try and be specific with dates - to dig a little deeper in their research and see if they could find month and day. We also went through each question one last time and made sure they understood what was needed with each question. They seemed to have a good understanding with what each question was asking. As I reviewed what students had so far - I pulled some of them to me that needed to clarify a few things in their summaries.
Due next week - each child will look at the material they have gathered and pull out at least 10 facts about their person. The events they use must have dates, as they will build their timeline with this list.
MATH
1st Grade: Check-Up: On Wednesday, we finished our study on Transitivity. We continued working with weighing all three bags and recording our results. However, this week we added a twist - we only weighed each object with the pennies. We didn’t add the third scale of comparing the other two objects. We had to look at our results from weighing each object with the pennies. We worked through this new idea while working through our student journal.
We completed our unit on weight and it was time for our Check-up! The children will complete a Chapter Check-up after we work through all of the lessons in a unit. With Winter Break around the corner I wanted them to take their check-up before our break. After the check-up we had just enough time to write our letter to Imi and Zani comparing our three weights.
2nd Grade: Marble Crash Test: We received our fax from Dru and Teller. Our new task will be to invent a seat belt for our friends - keeping in mind we have to be creative with our supplies because Dru and Teller might not have what we would normally use. When we return from break the children will work towards creating and testing a car seat using eggs in their crash tests.
Due to Winter Break we are waiting to start our crash test - so Thursday we had a fun day! We played around the world with addition. Then we switched it up and played it with subtraction. The kids were doing so well that for a third round to the game - each child had a white board and as I would say the problem - they all had a chance to answer these questions. For the final round the students did amazing and we had 5 winners!
3rd Grade: Linear Measurement - A Pen for the Yeti's Pet: We started our new lesson this week and our new math focus will on perimeter. Our first challenge after hearing a story about our Yeti having a pet in a pen - is figuring out what pet would fit in the 8x20ft pen. We made a long list and slowly started eliminating some of the animals from our list with our discussion. Our final conclusion was a pig or dog would be a good fit for the pet. Then we split into two groups and each group measured out the dimensions of the pen using their feet. After the groups were finished, we were confused because the pens did not match…
On Thursday we started to talk about the reasons why the pens did not match by discussing the different approaches the groups took to measuring. This led us back into a discussion on benchmarks and shoe sizes. We then talked about what would have been a good way to measure it out properly and the group decided that a tape measure would be a perfect tool! Now, we had to solve a problem...We have to find a way to fit a pen in the schoolyard using exactly 56 ft of fencing, but the 8x20 ft pen is too big for the schoolyard. The students must create a new pen with different dimensions and they must use all of the fencing. They will continue with this task when they return from break.
4th Grade: The Shape of Things - 3-D Shapes Inside Out: This week we began to take a closer look at 3-D shapes. The students finished filling out their worksheet tallying up the number of faces, edges and vertices of each shape. Then as a class we looked at the results and came up with some patterns we discovered for the prisms and the pyramids. We also looked further at these numbers and came up with mathematical equations we can use if we know one of the numbers.
Some conclusions we discovered:
Prisms:
We can double the number of vertices on the base to find the total vertices of the shape.
To find the number of edges we can multiply by 3 the number of sides of the polygon that is the base.
Pyramids:
The number of vertices is the same as the number of faces.
To find the number of edges we can multiply by 2 the number of sides on the base.
We did not meet on Thursday due to the two hour delay. We will continue exploring 3-D shapes when we return from winter break.
Important Dates:
December 16: Winter Wonderland 5:30-7:00 p.m.
December 19th: Holiday Parties
December 21st- January 3rd: Winter Recess
January 4th: Class Resumes
January 13th: End of 2nd Quarter
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: 
