This week in Our Big Backyard…
We began with the Blackland Prairie imagining the sea of native grasses that grew in this area we now know as Austin. We took a look at how tall the grass stood from 3’-10’…taller than most of us (we measured). But what was astounding is that their roots reach down 10 or more feet (we measure that too!) to create an amazing interweaving of roots.
We learned that grasses and their roots were and are what keeps the soil in place. Native grasses created soil so rich it was black and full of minerals, and it was often food and shelter for small animals, birds and insects. We have a few native grasses in front of our school and we harvested some of their seeds…Lindheimer Muhly (named after the German botanist Frederich Lindheimer) and Switchgrass. Ms. Anne brought us Sea Oats from her garden. It’s a great time of year to take a seed collecting walk in our neighborhoods or nature paths!
Growing with native grasses are forbs. Broadleaf, herbaceous plants – also called wildflowers. We dissected flowers to see what’s inside. We worked together in our new teams to identify all of the interesting parts.
We crafted our own special flowers for our art Garden!
We decided we needed a class pet…so now we have 50 worms living in the worm farm we all created together! We wanted to give them plenty to nibble on so we layered their habitat like a lasagna…newspaper, dirt, leaves, a sprinkle of food scraps…repeat! We’ve learned that worms may be small, but they are mighty…transforming and aerating the soil – one of nature’s greatest recyclers.
Ants are another one of soil’s heroes and the plant kingdom’s friend. We created our own ant chambers in an Alpha Ant Colony…some of the chambers are TV rooms and some are kitchens or bedrooms – those lucky ants!
This week in Language Arts…
Ms. Eliza’s group…
Our letters of the week were Pp & Cc and we painted our sight words to create I like… sentences. This quarter we’re focusing on nonfiction books and discovering how they’re different from Fiction stories. We had fun taking the journey in the book Two Bad Ants and finding out how scaredy-pants the tiger was about worms in What About Worms!?
We spend time with our book baskets and have “Read to Yourself” time everyday giving us time to practice skills we’re learning and to just enjoy books!
Ms. Kim’s Group…
We started this quarter by talking about why writers write. We referred back to some of the stories we read last quarter. Then we did a little activity where we each wrote in our composition books what the best and worst things on the playground were. It was so enlightening: some of our BESTs were other people’s WORSTs! Were those things true? Yes! But they were not true for everyone. Things like these are opinions. They are very important, they make up our personalities, but they can also cause confusion and misunderstandings so we need to be aware of them.
We explored a huge pile of books from the Austin Public Library! We judged these books by their covers and titles and wondered why these authors might have written them. “They knew a lot about Harry Potter and building Legos and thought they’d teach other people?” “Maybe they were a big fan of Messi.” “Maybe they like nature and they can paint and stuff so they put it together in the book so people will take care of rivers and streams and not pollute them.”
We sorted the books into piles that seemed similar: “How to Books,” “History Books,” “Nature Books,”
They were all different, but they were all what we consider nonfiction, and they are the books we will focus on this quarter!
If you want your students to do this…. Prompt them with this…
This week in Math…
Ms. Kim’s Group…
We started Q2 off with a crazy counting challenge! We learned that there are many different ways of looking at things! Landon counted 248 things and Ms. Kim only counted 8! There are also different ways of counting. Lots of s students used dots or little lines to account for items they saw. Some students had trouble counting huge amounts, so we started grouping their lines into sets of smaller bunches of ten… Edie found out that she had counted 103 things!
We met our new Addition and Subtraction Books, we practiced our number writing, and we played “Knock-out 2’s,” and “Chasey!”
And…we’re OFF!!!! Whew!!!!
Ms. Eliza’s group…
This quarter we’ll be exploring word problems. We started with The Racoon Problem. Partners worked together to solve and present their results. We didn’t all get the same answer (we got 3 different answers between 5 partnerships) which gave us the opportunity to discuss our strategies and to see how we might go about it next time. We started our discussions about subtraction, creating our own oral word problems using blocks. We also continued our study of place value building, expanding and writing our numbers in the 60s. It was a busy week for Math Wizards!
& In Other News…
Getting our Q2 self-portraits underway…
learning Pentago… a new game
sharing a beautiful piece of coral from the Bahamas….
and discovering the water cycle while out and about over the break!
