First week back for Deltas!

Welcome back everyone! It’s been great to see everyone’s smiling faces. We also want welcome Ms. Ruchi to her first full Quarter at AHB. She’s been doing a wonderful job and the kids are really into her lesson plans and activities.

Now that we have our awesome new co-teacher, all three of us will be sharing Theme, math and ELA duties, so the blog will of course include comments from everyone.

Here’s a few pics from some fun activities we did this week…. we made sundials in Mr. J’s math group. In Theme, we created a scale model of the solar system using toilet paper (!) and worked a lot with measurements about the solar system in general. We have gone through a thorough introduction to astronomy and why we should care about it, and learned about the scale of distance and astronomy-math connection. We did some challenging, yet fun, astronomy-related math problems in Theme this week, which everyone seemed to enjoy.

Thursday was also Math Pentathlon Day. We always have a blast!

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In Kirsten’s Math group:

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We have practiced fraction addition, subtraction, multiplication & division w/a Math for All Fraction Tic Tac Toe ‘game’, solved lots of fraction word problems from NASA Space math and the Astronomy chapter of Edward Zaccaro’s Challenge Math book and practice mental math and memorization (including, of course, fractions).

Lastly, as a group we chose to do a STEM project called Stranded from Building Math which we will start beginning next week – look for more info on that coming soon!

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In Kirsten & Ruchi’s ELA group:
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Our read aloud book is

George’s Secret Key to the Universe

(http://www.amazon.com/Georges-Secret-Universe-Stephen-Hawking/dp/1416985840)

and we have read the first 5 chapters as of this week! The kids are taking notes as we read aloud to answer the 5 Ws – in as few sentences as possible – this works on summary and reading comprehension skills.

For writing, we are learning the 6 Traits of Writing – so far have begun to discuss Trait 1 (Ideas and Content) and reviewed the meaning of the words plot, character, 1st person narrative and 3rd person narrative. See

http://www.literatelearner.com/6traits/page_template6t.php?f=main

for some basic info on the 6 Traits. We worked through some focus areas to work on with Trait 1 which include:

Getting to the point;

Uses your Senses;

Paint a Picture;

Details over Generalizations;

Narrow your topic;

Observe & Tell

Lastly, we did some spelling, vocabulary, root word practice with Words Their Way with words having the prefixes of mono, uni, bi, and tri.

Look for vocabulary, spelling, and sight words to be part of next weeks PnP!

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In Ruchi’s Math Group:
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This week, we have been working on what we remember about fractions, in addition to going over new material (including adding and subtracting fractions). The students have really been enjoying NASA Spacemath problems, so by popular demand we will continue to work on that throughout the quarter whenever applicable! I have been very happy with everyone’s progress in class, and really enjoy working with this group as both a teammate and a coach. One great thing I have noticed is that the students love helping each other–a wonderful trait that I will always encourage! The PnP due Monday will be something that the students themselves create (3 word problems related to fractions and astronomy), and then circulate among each other to solve next week. I look forward to getting to know everyone better and helping them refine their skills!