This week in Alpha…
We’d like to send a big THANKS and deep bow of gratitude to Michelle, Sarah(and Roonie), Megan, and Katie(and Noodle), who were able to help us last-minute on our Hyde Park walk- and to Louise for hanging our beautiful self-portraits in the hallway!
Doing our jobs is important!
Calling out Choosing Stones for morning snack
Our Big Backyard takes us to…Hyde Park!
Last year we learned all about what was inside our bodies, and what each system needed in terms of care and feeding in order to stay healthy. Where people live is important to our health so…WHY AUSTIN?! We knew that all living things need AIR most of all – Austin has plenty of air…check! Next, all living things need WATER…when the first people came through Austin was there water?
Many hands shot up, because they’ve seen a big river in Austin! Austin was a special place because of that river. Our school sits in the middle of the very first neighborhood in Austin: Hyde Park!
Before it was Hyde Park it was a Fair Grounds and a racetrack waaaaay up here!
The Alphas have left the building…for the Moonlight Tower!
We are right across the street from the very first Moonlight Tower that was erected in Austin, thanks to the efforts of Mr. Shipe (the founder of Hyde Park), and the electricity created by the mighty Colorado River!
Students “draw what they saw…”
Strolling through our Historic neighborhood…
Mr. Shipe’s house was made out of the old fairground’s grandstand and stadium bleachers!
After our stroll through the fancy part of the neighborhood, we learned that a large portion of the land hadn’t been sold. Mr. Shipe realized that many people would love to own houses, just not big fancy ones. So he built “mass-produced” homes. These homes were smaller and looked very much each other, and the people who bought them didn’t have much say in how they were built – they bought them “as-is.”
Our class helper showed us the difference between making a house from scratch and how much time we save when we build in a mass-constructive way!
Wyatt did a great job building one house – but we need 20!
So we enlisted help from machinery: the dangerous paper cutter! It is only to be used by trained professionals. We were able to cut enough paper at one time for everyone to build a house in NO TIME FLAT!
We built a “neat street.”
We listened to a story called the Big Orange Splot, about a man who lived on a “neat street” of identical houses, until fate intervened – and a big orange split appeared on his roof. Rather than clean it, Mr. Plumbean was inspired to turn his house into a reflection of his wildest dreams. You will never guess what happened the next day in ALPHA!
We ended up with big orange splots too and we got to plan out and realize the homes of our dreams…
Alien house…
Jungle house
Candy house
This week in Language Arts…
Ms. Eliza’s group…
This week we got to know each other’s names, how they’re spelled, what letter they start with, how many letters each of us have and we learned more about one another. We made name labels for our writing journals, created a collage with scissors and beautiful papers, and started our unit on Illustration with two special books…Dog Loves Drawing (we found out we do too!) and Red, A Crayon Story.
We explored how valuable illustrations are to stories and how to be book detectives looking for clues or hidden surprises in illustrations. We also practiced how to be reading partners.
Ms. Kim’s Group…
Starting the week off with putin’ the “Language” in Language Arts… “If you were Annabelle in The Doll People, how would you get down from the doll house?”
This week we started our word work, handwriting, and literacy routine. We reviewed short “a” and short “i” vowel words. We discussed the mechanics of handwriting. It’s great to make legible letters, but it must be easy for your hand too! So if we learn to make our strokes certain ways, it will make our hands less tired when we write. That means we might have to change the way we make some of our letters. That could feel weird right now, but later, it will make writing faster and easier! This week we started with our amazing “magic “c,” which we used to make “o,” “a,” and even “s”. We read Yoko, and are beginning to compare our first two fictional stories!
This week in Math…
Ms. Kim’s Group…
We started talking about how our brains love to make sense of things by looking for patterns and grouping things into categories.
We thought about some ways we sort things at school: table team supplies, backpacks, water bottles, choosing stones…
We can find them easily that way! When our brains discover patterns, IT can retrieve information easily too! Our students knew a routine for school: come down the hall, hang the backpack, read the chalkboard, put stuff away…etc. Patterns are cool! Math is full of patterns and sorting. We started with a challenge involving our shoes!
We mixed ‘em up real good and by a show of hands, everyone felt confident they’d be able to find their own shoe at the end of the lesson.
Then we covered the pile with a table cloth.
It wasn’t so easy to tell whose shoe was whose! So we described our shoes…Some had sparkles, some were all black, some were boots, some were black and pink and purple….We call these details “attributes.” We were able to place the shoe with the owner easily once we knew what all the attributes of everyones’ shoes looked like!
Shoe Portraits!!!!
Playing Race to the Top!
Ms. Eliza’s group…
We started our week by reflecting on what we don’t like people to say or do when we’re doing math together… a couple of our thoughts were…”when people are doing distracting things”, “when someone says that’s wrong in a mean way.” And then we reflected on what we DO like…”when it’s quiet and I can focus”, “when I have a helpful game partner” and many more!
We also talked about what our job is while one of us is explaining how they solved a challenge. We played How Many Do You See and as we did we thought about how we would explain our reasoning, convince others that our answer was accurate or how our strategy was helpful and listen closely so that we could pose questions to one another. We were practicing how to listen and wonder about each other’s thinking.
We partnered up for Play & Roll, shared our knowledge about addition and solved domino problems. We’ve launched into an exciting year of being Math Wizards!
In STEAM…
There was a strong wind a-comin’ and this week’s challenge was to build a tower out of paper and masking (using what we learned from last week’s towers) that could withstand it!
In other news…
Meet Noodle, Anna’s service dog, who accompanied us on
our walkabout to Avenue G and the racetrack!
Family Photos!
