This week in Our Big Backyard…
The questions we had this week were…What’s under the soil? What’s down deep?
We went way back in time when our sun was newly formed and space dust and debris swirled around it which slowly gathered to make planets and our earth. We learned how all of those minerals and materials can still be traced to everything around us.
A peach looks a bit like inner earth!
We talked about how, although we don’t have the tools to travel down too deep (and it’s too hot!), scientists have created other ways to “see” what’s between us and the other side of our earthly sphere. We met Dr. Inge Lehman, a seismologist who listened very carefully to transmissions from earthquakes to discover that inner earth has layers. Building on this knowledge, other scientists were able to explain that earth has a very hot inner core (as hot as the surface of the sun), an outer core, a wide layer of magma that’s still so hot from the core that it melts rock and then the crust. The crust is where the soil, the ocean floor and the mountains all rise from.
Acting out the layers of inner earth
Earth Models & diagrams…
We experimented with heat to look at how it has the power to make things like magma to MOVE! The ever cycling heat rising from the core and cooling nearer to the crust, the cool part sinking and the hot part rising beneath the earth’s crust creates a current that keeps our earth ever changing! We melted rocks (chocolate chips) to see how they turn into molten liquid!
To understand the crust of our earth we needed to explore where all the land came from and we found that volcanoes used to cover our earth and continue to bring minerals and land forming materials to the earth’s surface. We talked about Volcanoes near us on the islands of Hawaii where the largest active volcano Kilauea lives (and it just erupted again this week!). We also explored how before scientists had developed the tools to understand rocks, earthquakes and volcanoes people created myths and gods to try to understand where their power emanated from. We met the Roman god Vulan from which the word volcano comes and Pele the Hawaiian goddess of Volcano and how her temper can become rivers of fire. We created our own exploding volcanoes and when we watched lava flow in a video…it was amazing to see how lava can move, destroy and change anything in its path.
What’s inside a volcano?
This week in Language Arts…
Ms. Eliza’s group…
Rr and Tt were our special letters this week. When we added them to the other letters we’ve learned so far this year A, S, and M, it gave us a chance to explore how many words could be made! Learning how these sounds transform into words is the foundation of our reading and writing practice.
We read Nobody Hugs a Cactus and The Bad Seed and talked about how characters can be created out of anything! Then we drew a bunch of characters of our own…”look! I made a carrot person!” We read Ruthie and the Not So Little Lie to explore that characters have outside traits such as what they look like or how old they are, but they also have inside traits that tell us how they feel or what they may be thinking. We thought about what honesty and lies are and how they affect us and each other.
Ms. Kim’s Group…
We worked on the “th” digraph, we shared our P&P, we listened to Stellaluna, and discussed how fictional stories have parts: Beginnings, Middles, and Ends. Each section is full of detail but each has something big in it that is important to the story. Knowing the big parts helps us summarize stories. We LOVED writing our own beginning, middle, and end Comics!
“th” digraph at the end… yes…we say “th” with our tongues between our TEETH!!!!!
We had lots of pets appear in our Naughty Stories…Annalise’s Aunt’s pup Grogru, and Isla’s pup Molly sure keep people on their toes!
This week in Math…
Ms. Kim’s Group…
We worked on our Cycle of Seasons project (ooooh….we are getting good at cutting!), and we learned a symmetry game! We hunted for the line of symmetry in natural objects and made some in our artwork!
Ms. Eliza’s group…
Our focus in math continues to be understanding place and value. We use the same basic numbers over and over, but where they are placed determines their value. This is actually a big concept to absorb and to explain back (to show that we each understand it) and we’re discussing and exploring it every week.
Explaining odd and even patterns
This week we worked on the value of 20’s, we talked about doubles facts and what makes them doubles. These are facts we want to work on commiting to memory.
In small groups, some of us played How Many Dots? How Many Dots is a game rich in math application and understanding. Using at least 10 sets of 6-sided dice that we roll we have to solve how many dots there are altogether. We find that by grouping the dots into sets of 5 or 10 they are much easier to count. To do that we need to add the dots to make 10 with 2, 3, 4, or even 5 numbers together. We also use estimation to see if we can predict how many there might be and then we analyze how close our predictions were, what the difference was with our numbers and greater or lesser concepts. We’ll be playing How Many Dots throughout the year adding more dice as time goes by to work on bigger numbers.
In STEAM…
To build on our How Longa Strip Can You Make Outta One Piece of Paper? Challenge we decided to see how long of a strip we can make if we tape our longest strips ALTOGETHER?! Holy Moly Rock and Rolly…look what happened! We went all the way out the front door!!!
By the Community Hall…
Orange Table tapes their strip to Skye Blue…
Down the Hall…
Out the door!
In other news…
Gammas came in on Monday to share the reading tablets from the olden days they had made with us!
Helping to set-up our tooth chart
Skippity during Math Out!
Posing for a portrait in The Book About Everybody!
