Our penguins chillin’ in the Peace Corner

Alphas started Q3 off with new table team goals for the New Year! We are learning how to take responsibility for our team-environments and our team relationships. We will be taking on daily team-jobs and learning how to recognize conflict and how to respectfully deal with it!

Table teams deciding who’s responsible for daily table jobs including…

Pencils, Cans on and off, Sweeper, and Spray and Scrub…

Pao and Leo spraying down their tables…

Water, Water Everywhere!

This week Alphas reviewed the essential things all living things need: air, water, and food. They knew that humans were mostly made out of water and they learned that our planet is mostly covered in water too! Alphas knew that the water in the oceans was too salty to drink and they learned that out of ALL the water on our planet only about 3% of it is fresh. They learned that of that 3%, only 1/2% is available for all living things to use! THAT IS NOT VERY MUCH! That makes water a pretty precious resource.

Alphas acting out the water-cycle…here they are “condencing!” in a cloud…

We wondered what happens when fresh water falls on land. We built models with our table teams to find out.

Alphas building up land then filling up a “rain cloud” to see what happens…

Alphas noticed how the was absorbed into the land and then how it pushed the land down into the tray, making streams, rivers, and lakes. Water was surprisingly strong! Then we talked about how water pushes other things into streams. Like toys we leave out, like trash we drop, like pet poop we don’t pick up…

Alphas trashed-out their sand trays with glitter-plastic, pepper-dog-poop, and food coloring oil and pesticides…

THEN CAME THE RAIN!!!!!!

Ewww…not looking good for the ocean…

Then Alphas documented their demonstrations, like all good scientists!

Alphas follow the rivers to the sea…

Alpha table teams illustrate the different parts of the beach: Dunes, berm, swash-zone hide and low tide areas, and the open ocean.

Alphas met the creatures that live in the different areas of the beach and added them to their section of the shore…

This week in Math…

Ms. Kim’s group…

Alphas have begun their Geometric Journey!!! We learned about lines: the straight, the wavy, the horizontal, the vertical, the diagonal. We learned shapes are “closed.” There are organic shapes, curved shape, and shapes with straight line that meet at points. We call the staight lined shapes “polygons.” In order to make straight lines, we used rulers. We also practiced adding and subtracting!

Ms. Eliza’s group…

We’ve begun our investigation of money with pennies and magnifying glasses! There’s a lot of cool information on pennies -symbols, words, even where they were minted. We dug through Ms. Eliza’s piggy bank and found one from 1921 – over 100 years old! And for the rest of the week Math Wizards were digging through their pennies at home to find the oldest ones in their collections to share – 1969, 1988, 1954 so far to date.

We studied the commutative (flip-flop) property, worked through word problems and started Mad Minutes Tuesdays and Thursdays.

This week in Language Arts…

Ms. Eliza’s group…

Ms. Kim’s group…

We started exploring poetry! We made list-poems with our table mates using nouns and verbs. We practiced our handwriting, our high frequency words, and words with ending blends.