K/1st: Week of Feb 10

This week in Alpha!

Why AHB? WE LOVE that we can be ourselves – even with Middle Schoolers &

we LOVED having your help making our friendship keychains

(L-R) Yuki, Nicolle, Pippin, Willow, & Scarlet!

Larry the Leprechaun struck twice this week: He switched out of book baskets AND he mixed up our table team supplies!

The teachers said if he does ONE MORE THING we might have to make Larry Traps to teach that mischief-maker a lesson!

In our Bigger Backyard…

Alphas learned that Paleo-Indians in east Texas discovered as they followed their food throughout the year, that the animals they followed would return to their previous grazing lands. Archeologists believe that these early hunter/gatherers learned to leave stone ovens intact and bury tools at those sites so they would be waiting for them when they returned. Archeologists and anthropologists have also thought that they may have noticed that in their middens they’d find some of their favorite foods sprouting. Just like all animals spread seeds and fertilize the soil they grow in, humans do too! Alphas also knew that in East Texas there were prairie breaks on the edge lands of the piney woods filled with rich soil left from years and years of deposition on the floodplains. Archeologists believe this is why it was a perfect spot to support the first permanent dwellings in Texas!

Hunter-gatherers had to travel light because of their constant movement. However, the people of East Texas settled in one place and cultivated much of their food, which meant they needed a way to store surplus. They may have discovered that a particular type of soil when accidentally baked in an oven, would harden into a solid form. This likely led to the creation of pots and jugs that could store food and protect it from animals looking to steal their hard-earned harvest. We tried our hand at building coil pots!

All roads led to East Texas!

When you have more than you need it’s easy to trade with others who need what you have! Alphas had a GREAT time making a Table Team surplus of…cured meats from the butcher team, shell jewelry from the river people, bone tools from the megafauna hunters, clay items from the East Texas people, and spears from the antler builders.

Alphas used lots of teamwork to gather their wares!

EVERYONE can use an atlatl made of bone! Sky Blue table sold out of shell jewelry and beads!

We watched a video of a Caddo elder passing down his knowledge of home-building to the people of Texas! Then we built models of these “bee hive houses” – it was a challenge!

In Math…

Ms. Kim’s Mathletes started our days this week looking at the way we look at things – like DOTS. We shared our thoughts and turned those thoughts into equations. Some very smart people at Stanford call these conversations “Dot Talks.”

We have been getting to know coins (just in time for our precious penny to be shown the door :) ). We talked a lot about their value and why we might prefer a tiny dime more than ten pennies…

Fox ponders similarities and differences between a dime and a penny…

Adding dimes and pennies…WE ARE GETTING THE HANG OF THIS!

We learned a game of strategy called “Dots and Boxes.” Some students are learning to think outside of the box to make the final line that captures the box!

Scarlet and C.J. are tied for boxes…

We shared our polygon pals and our cubes from home! Then we made “footprints” with our 3D shapes.

Jack tells us about the archer he made out of polygons!

Ms. Eliza’s Math Wizards continued to talk about the attributes of shapes. We drew obots using only squares and flowers using only ovals. We began to compare 2D and 3D shapes and revisiting terms we learned from last year like edge, face, and vertices. We played Hexagon and other geometry games. For our practice with math facts we originally thought adding 9 to a number is hard, but when we learned how to see it as 10 and subtract 1 it suddenly became easy as pie!

We created a bar graph to tell us which shape was the most liked out of all the We data we collected from our families about shapes that we collected from our families and friends…we had one missing so we wanted to make sure we included it so we’ll let you know the final outcome next wee, but for now…rhombus is in the lead!

In ELA…

Ms. Eliza’s Reader’s & Writers reviewed short u cvc words. The sight words we added to our growing list are and & play.We spend time playing with our new words and experimenting with different cvc patterns. In Writer’s Workshop we wrote poems about ourselves. In describing things we are good at we found we are bike riders, fighters, readers, artists. Ms. Eliza REALLY needs to think about taking photos when we’re in our ELA group!

Ms. Kim’s Mad Poet Society…

Talked a lot about the nuts and bolts of sentence writing. Poets break a lot of writing rules on purpose – so for us to be very intentional in OUR writing, we need to be sure we know the rules before we break them 🙂 We learned about subjects and predicates. We practiced identifying them by choosing random subject phrases and random predicate phrases out of their respective cans and joining them to find some very silly, yet “complete,” sentences! Wyatt testified to this, “At first I didn’t want to write more sentences in my composition book, but now I’M OBSESSED!”

Nice job Gabriel!

In spelling, we are learning about “s” and “es” endings to nouns and verbs. Sometimes these endings indicate that a noun has become “plural.” Sometimes it just changes a verb form – “I run and he runs too.”

In Other News…

We talk about how great it feels to share our knowledge and skills with others. That’s why we work so hard to learn how to do things. We teachers love witnessing how this manifests in our multiage classroom…