General News
- We have a few cute Gamma traditions we look forward to doing on Friendship Day on February 13th! Gamma’s are welcome to bring in cards and treats for their classmates. We’ll be using the traditional decorated paper bags as mailboxes. 🙂
- February 17th is Family Field Day/President’s Day. There will be no school.
ELA Update
This week in ELA we started to spend more time diving into our novel. On Monday we went over P&P and got into small groups for discussion about our reading response questions. On Tuesday and Wednesday we explored figurative language and vocabulary from the novel. We learned about how to make an inference about the meaning of an unfamiliar vocabulary word through the equation of schema + context = inference. We did a little storytelling about times we were in a situation similar to characters in the book. We talked about our worst injury ever, a time a toy or item you really loved was taken away, and a moment when the whole class was excited about something together. This exercise in storytelling was a great way to activate our schema and life experiences to help us make sense of what is happening in the story. We then reread parts of the text to gain context of the story to figure out what words like imperceptible, forlorn, and uproarious meant. We learned that authors use figurative language to make the writing richer, more vivid, and more interesting. We analyzed specific quotes from the text to see if the author was using simile, metaphor, hyperbole, personification, metaphor, alliteration, or onomatopoeia. We discussed the figurative meaning and what the author was trying to elicit from the reader by using these techniques. To close out this figurative language lesson we got creative with drawing and watercoloring one of four scenes from the book. We’ll finish these illustrations up next week before we move on to analyzing the next section of chapters!
Math Update
In math class we are finally leaving division behind a little bit as we branch into new units. The most fun we had this week was participating in the Bottle Flipping Olympics—an activity where kids apply their conversion of fractions to decimals to find their average percentage of successful bottle flips. (Year 2 kids merged with the Deltas for this one! It was fun to be reunited for a day!) Year 1 kiddos are starting our geometry unit. This unit is usually a class favorite–geometry is so hands-on with lots of opportunities for real world applications. It may feel like a welcome break from the sweat required to execute the steps of long division. Kids have all received a “Geometry Vocabulary Packet” containing everything they could ever want to know about geometry terms. It will be helpful to refer to this packet often so we voted to leave them in the blue homework folder in case kids wanted to access it from home. (There is also a copy available on Whippermathers.com) Year 2 kids learned a “shortcut” for multiplication and division with decimals and powers of 10. They learned that you can simply count the number of zeros and hop that decimal to make computation super quick and easy! We tied this to metric conversions, which will be studied more in-depth at a later time. Next week, we’ll head into graphing basic functions.
Theme pdate
We were meant to deep dive into the Civil War this week–the battles, the timeline, etc.–BUT we really wanted to give kids some exposure to The Emancipation Proclamation and Juneteenth before visiting the Carver museum for our field trip on Thursday. On Monday, we did a quick overview of the Civil War and read from an intriguing and relevant book focused on the reasons kids should study the Civil War that was written by Ms. Eliza’s dad—amazing!!! Tuesday, we did a partner activity analysing political cartoons about The Emancipation Proclamation from both sides of the war. Next, we did an interactive video activity to get an overview of the timeline of how things unfolded following Abraham Lincoln’s important decision to end slavery. A scavenger hunt followed the next day so kids could get an understanding of the holiday of Juneteenth–where/why/how it is celebrated in Texas. It was an action-packed theme week that led up beautifully to our field trip! (Thanks again to our parent chaperones/drivers!) Both spots we visited were so relevant to our recent learning and helped provide kids an opportunity to see photos and relics from this important time in history. It would be an understatement to say the Gammas represented our class and school with flying colors—it was really delightful to watch them apply their learning. Their participation (and thoughtful questions/comments) made our Gamma hearts glow!
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