K/1st: Week of Feb 24

This week in Alpha!

Wyatt wows Alphas with another amazing feat of magic!

As we approach the end of our third quarter, our class time is filled with review, wrap-up, and assessment conferences with individual students. It’s a busy time, and we have little patience for the high-jinks of Larry the Leprechaun. Thank you to our families for the cardboard donations—we look forward to using our 3D skills to build traps to catch the mischief-maker!

In our Bigger Backyard…

This week, we learned about the original inhabitants of the coastal plains through the perspective of a European explorer who made first contact with them. Cabeza de Vaca, along with a crew of sailors, landed on Texas soil after their ship sank. He kept a journal documenting life with the people who rescued them, and the Alphas read excerpts from it. We discovered that the coastal plains people were hunter-gatherers who traveled to various locations, eating whatever was available. When pecans were falling, they would gather in pecan groves and eat only pecans; when prickly pear tunas were ripe, they would head to fields filled with them and eat little else. We also learned that they wove mats to cover arched “tent poles,” which could be worn on their backs while they moved from place to place. Additionally, they used fire as both a hunting tool and a way to keep swarms of mosquitoes at bay.

Here’s a link to some of the journal entries we read…

Click on “Lost in Texas”

Documenting first contact between Europeans and First Nation people in Texas.

Sketching portraits of Cabeza de Vaca.

Adding to our Texas regions dioramas…building canyon walls…

and rivers

In Math…

Ms. Kim’s Mathletes are getting good at identifying coins and their value! We are prepping ourselves for building 3D shapes that will be used to TRAP LARRY! We are really excited about this! We also met with Ms. Kim to show off all we know about shapes and money!

Using 2D shapes to create the illusion of 3D shapes!

Ms. Eliza’s Math Wizards…have been working on our Q3 Assessment, playing games, and finishing up projects.

On Thursday our math groups worked together on geometry puzzle challenges. Can you fill the space with 3 shapes? 4 shapes? 5?

Then we made our own designs for our classmates to solve…

Some were very complex and beautiful!

In ELA…

Ms. Eliza’s Reader’s & Writers…joined the second years to read with partners, and to write poems.

Ms. Kim’s Mad Poet Society…

Alpha Poets are thrilled about concrete poems! We shared our creations, wrote even more, anTheyd helped our younger classmates write some too. We also made fantastic reading partners!