A lovey can be a pumpkin!
This week in Our Big Backyard…
When your friends and family ask what you did at school all week you can honestly tell them you played in the dirt. Boy, did we EVER! Alphas LOVED seeing where all our friends live around Austin (and beyond). This place we live supports life of many people and creatures. We have a big river that gives us water, we have plenty of sunlight, and air so we wanted to explore the world below our feet that provided people with everything they needed to eat and use for tools for thousands of years. Yes, everything man-made can find it’s way back to the Earth! We traced many things backwards… Ms. Kim’s guitar, our clothes toys, …everything we used could find it’s origins in the soil. So what is it exactly? This awesome important stuff? When people have questions, they make observations. Scientists who study nature are called by lots of different names; scientists that study soil and minerals are called geologists. We were going to make more general observations, but like scientists, we were going to document what we saw. We got Nature Journals, and we learned a few procedures for collecting information -or- data. Then we grabbed our table team supply kits and headed outside to do our first observations!
Journals? Check…Pencils? Check…Magnifying glasses? Check…PEEPS?….Check…Team frame?… Check!
Landon has a frame his table team will use to view their patch of the ground.
Students and Peeps make careful observations about the ground below them and the sounds, smells, and sense they experience around themselves; they jot down quick notes…
…we add color and detail in class!
Each student brought a sample of soil from their yard to explore.
“Whoa-moments…”
Worms!
Seedpods!
We talked about all the living and nonliving things we found in all of our soil samples. It was amazing how different everyone’s soil was even though we ALL live in Austin (well almost)! We stirred up our personal soil sample one last time and put a LOT of it into the jar we brought from home. We added a lot of water to it, put the lid on, and shook it up. We are going to observe how all those individual things we saw will settle out after a day or two. We discussed how that mixture on living and nonliving things that makes soil is layered all across most land on Earth. Scientists call this soil horizons. Alphas worked on a large art installation dedicated to
soil horizons…
Finally, we considered each soil layer, and its usefulness in the horizons…Alphas figured
bedrock alone wouldn’t be too great to grow seeds on…nor would gravel…
…clay was would trap the roots and not oxygen could get to it…
Alphas figured that the best place for plants to grow would be in the fluffy soil, the mix of minerals and organic material. They learned that it can take a very long time to make that fluffy healthy soil… in some places, it might take thousands of years! ALphas learned that all it could take to destroy healthy soil might be carelessness – people leaving poisonous things near or on the soil.
Circle Time Reflections…
This week we discussed how we organize ourselves in communities. We are talking a LOT about sorting and organizing in math, but it is really helpful to see how we do this all around us all the time! When many people have to move somewhere at the same time people have discovered it is safer to do it in a LINE. Everybody knows that when we clap hands after recess we come inside – what do we do first? We line up! What is the most important thing we are trying to do? Our purpose is to get everyone inside safely and quickly. Does it matter who is first or last as much as it matters to get indoors? Sometimes two people come to a spot at the same time. Sometimes people jump ahead of others in a line – does that feel good? No.
Do you know what cutting in line is?…some of us didn’t realize that it’s an action that might be seen as impolite. Alphas came up with ideas of what to do if that happens…to talk to the person and remind them that what they just did was cut and could they please go to the end of the line? Was it fair to hold a place for someone? We agreed no. What’s most important? Keeping one another safe as we move into the building and through the hallways.
This week in Language Arts…
Ms. Eliza’s group…
Ss and Aa were our letters of the week.
Aa is our first vowel and we’re learning the difference between them and consonants. We played Match the Letters (upper and lowercase) with a partner and then traveled through the alphabet sound by sound.
We read The Book With No Pictures. It had us roaring with laughter and we thought it was amazing it was a picture book without pictures! Officer Buckle and Gloria was a great read to see that there’s a lot more than the words say when you look closely at the illustrations! The Stick Kid gave us inspiration to draw our own stick people. Some of us drew our families and others drew adventure stories. On Thursday we read How to Read a Story. With all of the books we read we make connections to our lives and with other stories we’ve read. Books are like friends we treasure and we’re learning to really look at the details books offer and to discuss them with our reading partners.
“This stick person is me with a starry sky”
Ms. Kim’s Group…
We worked on “ch” and “sh” digraphs, we shared our P&P, created diagrams of ourselves using words that described how we look on the outside and ways that we think, feels, and talents we may have on the inside! We read two Chris VAn Allsburg books and discussed how different these were from Yoko and The Name Jar. These books were “less real,” “more exciting,” “and they always ended in mystery…” We talked about how “settings” were important in all the books.
Unscrambling sentences…together.
My “Inside/Outside Traits’ Diagram”
Creating “setting dioramas” from books we’ve read…
This week in Math…
Ms. Kim’s Group…
We finished our A/B Pattern with our “night painting”, we are learning what a “sum” is and played “Gone Bannanas,” We shared our P&P, and after an incredible demonstration about the A/B/C/D pattern of the season, where Ms. Kim put each of us on a dolly and drove us around a candle-sun, at a tilt, like the Earth so we could actually experience how the seasons happen because of the EARTH’S TILT (breathe- this took two hands, so, apologies for no pictures…), we did a season sorting activity!
Ms. Eliza’s group…
We spent our week in Tens land!
We started with a project to sort and group items with a partner with these questions in mind…How many objects are in your collection? How can you organize the objects you see and count? How many there are? How does organization help you count? How can you record on paper how you organized your collection?
Some partners started by grouping in 2’s. Some counted by 1’s. As time passed, some groups thought counting by higher numbers like 5 or 10 went faster and grouped that way.
Then we took our knowledge of 10 to discuss that numbers have value and explored what value is. We looked at, and reviewed, base 10 blocks and how we build numbers in the teens. Our Math Wizards inspired one another with at least 3 different strategies to solve these problems. The next day we looked at how 10 is composed and what patterns we saw when we started with 0+10, 1+9, 2+8 etc. Then we decomposed 10 with a group of building blocks taking one away at a time. Math Wizards were seeing important patterns. We are always discussing and questioning!
In STEAM…
Our challenge was…how long can you make a piece of paper with just a pair of scissors? After experimenting with snipping sides, we started to realize if we cut in a spiral direction we can transform a rectangle into a realllly long strip, like a rope!
In other news…
Mmmmm…Birthday Dreamscicles!
Abracadabra! Magic tricks!!
