Math –
Ms. Andrea’s math group reviewed telling time to the hour, half hour and quarter hour and are working hard to determine time to the minute with precision! The crew also put our handmade paper clocks to use and counted all the way around an hour, minute by minute, and learned to play a new partner game called Tick Tock.
| 
| 
|
|---|
Ms. Kelly’s math group began division this week! In simple words, division can be defined as the splitting of a large group into smaller groups such that every group will have an equal number of items. Division initially spooks many kids at first, but beginning with a visual, like drawing equal groups, helps! When we finish our independent work, we jump into our multiplication fluency packets or play multiplication fluency games with a friend!
| 
| 
|
|---|
Literacy –
After a wonky week, book clubs finally got to meet on Thursday. We are stressing not only the importance of reading fluently with proper intonation, but slowing down and answering the response questions thoroughly and thoughtfully. This week we also practiced going back through a text to find evidence of the answers. This is an important skill that needs to be explicitly taught. Yes, if you don’t know the answer, you must go back and reread! We will continue with this practice for the rest of the year.
In writing we squeezed in our last two mini lessons for creating super sentences before we begin a unit on non-fiction, or informational writing. We focused on appositives at the beginning of the week. An appositive is a word or phrase that follows a noun and explains the noun. Commas are needed for clarifying information that is not essential to understanding the noun. After working together on a few, we partnered up and practiced. Towards the end of the week we tackled the run-on sentence. Probably the most common error for kids! We discussed together how to fix some of the teachers’ veeerryyy long run-on sentences with punctuation. And of course we got together with our writing partners and practiced on our own!
| 
| 
|
|---|---|---|
|
| 
|
Theme –
On Tuesday, after jotting down what we already know and what we want to know about simple machines, we read about the history of the 6 simple machines before answering some questions. We even had time for a little marble run fun!
On Wednesday, we explored our first simple machine- the lever! Levers are a type of simple machine that make work easier. Levers consist of three parts or actions working together: the fulcrum, or where the lever pivots; the load, or the work needed to be done; and the effort, or the force used to do the work. We worked in small groups investigating what happens when you move the fulcrum closer or farther away from the load.
Thursday brought us to our second simple machine- the wheel and axle! It uses a wheel with a rod attached in the middle as an axle to help it to lift or move loads. In some cases this machine works like a lever to multiply force (like with a doorknob or a fishing reel). In other cases it is used to move objects easier such as with wheels on a bicycle. This was the perfect time to bring out the Legos! We dug through to find wheels and axles and then added all the cool details to our vehicles! On Monday we will race them down a ramp and see whose car goes the farthest!
| 
| 
|
|---|---|---|
| 
| 
|
| 
| 
|
| 
| 
|
