Math-
Ms. Kelly’s math crew worked on some review this week, focusing on odd and even numbers, finding patterns on the hundreds chart and filling in missing numbers on a number line.
Ms. Skylar’s group are becoming masters of place value to the 10 thousands by playing many fun place value games!
Literacy-
The kids participate in many engaging activities on a daily basis, besides just reading, during Reading Workshop. For instance, we explicitly teach the kids the rules of the English language in order for them to decode bigger words they find challenging using games, manipulatives (like our movable letter boards) and paper/pencil work. It’s more than just a guessing game when it comes to figuring out an unknown word in a text, or spelling correctly, and we can teach the kids the “code”. Learning the science of reading empowers the kids to take on more challenging text, and spell more difficult words on their own! This week we reviewed open/closed syllables, short & long vowel sounds, as well as consonant digraphs (like ch, th, wh, etc.).
We have begun our first read aloud this week and the Betas are really enjoying it! The story is about eleven-year-old Vincent Shadow’s secret toy inventing room hidden in his attic and his notebook full of his latest toy inventions. Vincent is inspired by inventor Nikola Tesla and spends his summer developing his greatest idea for an annual toy inventing competition. Interested in learning more about Nicola Tesla? Click the link to listen to the story with your kiddo. The Story of Nikola Tesla “A Life Electric” Book Read-aloud
Vincent Shadow’s notebook full of inventions has inspired us to “invent” something as well! During Writing Workshop, we have begun to draw a prototype of something we would invent if we could, and are writing about what it is and what it does. Some really incredible ideas are popping up in the Beta room!
Theme-
This week we have learned that magnets have poles and that they can attract and repel objects, but not all objects. They must be a certain kind of metal.
We performed many investigation with magnets- *testing objects to see if they are attracted to the magnet *testing if a magnet can attract a paperclip through a variety of thick and thin materials * creating a magnet train using bar magnets * stacking ring magnets on a pencil so that no magnets are touching AND * discovering which part of a horseshoe magnet is the strongest by testing how many paperclips it can hold!
And like all good scientists, we recorded our findings in our journals.
We ended the week with a huge hit! The challenge was to create a maze or track for a (insert your choice of game piece) to zoom through using our magnetic wands! Each child created a maze or a scene for their “little guy” (who was backed by a small magnet) to move through. Once they were finished, they challenged their friends to give it a try!
