Math –
Ms. Andrea’s math crew “tallied the room” – including the number of buttons, fingers, and creepy crawlies, examined sequences of numbers to find their pattern and predict the next number in the sequence (skip counting by 2’s, 5’s & 10’s) and played a new game with a called 100 Frame Fill Up where they raced each other to reach 100 (exactly!), skip counting all the way there.
Ms. Kelly’s math group is building their place value skills to the 100 thousands by playing partner games, practicing how to convert a number and write it with a different place value (example- in 247,000 there are 247,000 ones, 24,700 tens, 2,470 hundreds and 247 thousands, played a rousing game of Place Value Yahtzee and took a quick quiz.
Literacy –
This week some of our kiddos practiced where to divide words into syllables so they could read really big words, others learned all things diphthongs and digraphs, everyone continued handwriting practice, worked on word ladders, letter games and of course reading during our reading block!
Earlier in the week during Writing Workshop, after reading Two Bad Ants, we discussed the problems in the story and how the story resolved itself in the end. Then it was our turn to brainstorm problems and solutions for our own buggy tales. Once we had our characters and their traits chosen, set the scene and brainstormed problems and solutions, we began to put all our parts together, creating an organized and simple Beginning, Middle and End. Next week- writing the real deal with all the juicy details!
Theme –
We explored the tiny but mighty ant this week! 🐜Did you know there are over 12,000 ant species worldwide? Or that ants are the longest living insects? Some can live for 30 years! Or that the ant is one of the world’s strongest creatures in relation to its size? A single ant can carry 20 times its own bodyweight, and they’ll even work together to move bigger objects as a group! Or that ants are social insects which live in colonies?
We teamed up to create ant colonies, making sure to include all the important chambers. In an ants’ nest, there are various types of chambers, including a chamber for the queen ant, chambers for worker ants, chambers in which larvae are cared for, chambers for food storage, and others for wastes and other purposes. After the kids designed and labeled the chambers, the extra creativity came in- adding fun details to each chamber and then adding a watercolor wash over it.
And we finally made some clothes for our Peeps!