K/1st: Week of Mar 24

WELCOME TO Quarter 4 Alphas!!!!

We came back from Spring break to discover that…

Larry made a MESS of our traps –

EVEN though he escaped, we made it tough enough that he lost a boot!

AND he left a surprise for us in an empty Lucky Charms box…

gold coins! Turns out they were the chocolate kind…he’s such a trickster!!

(We had to figure out how many there were and how we could fairly divide them up!)

In our Bigger Backyard…WHAT’S ABOVE US?!

A shot of the troposphere from outer space…

This week we talked about the troposphere – the thin layer of atmosphere we live in. We learned that it, like soil, contains a lot of stuff, but the big stuff is nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor.

We knew that living things create the atmosphere that all living things need to survive – plants provide oxygen, and animals provide carbon dioxide that they need. We learned that there are many layers of atmosphere surrounding our planet, but only one that we can breathe in, and it is only about 7 miles high! We got a map and a bit of string that was a scale model of 7 miles. We stretched it between our school and different directions from it, like the airport. Pretty much everybody has been to the airport. We imagined how long it would take to drive that far, but straight up… it sure doesn’t feel like that is a lot of air!

We learned that our planet’s gravity holds it down, like a blanket; the lowest places on Earth have the thickest amount of air above them. The higher places on the Earth have less air above them, which makes those areas colder and harder to breathe in! We made our first installment of our Layers of Atmosphere diagram.

We worked with our table teams to make posters to remind people to take care of our precious troposphere! It takes lots of collaboration and negotiation to create a work of art with a group of creative people!

In Math…

Ms. Kim’s Mathletes…

We used our money knowledge to practice place value skills! We played Roll to Ten with pennies and dimes. We added 10’s and 1’s and started making a book!

Ms. Eliza’s Math Wizards…

This week we looked at what happens when we split a shape into 2, 3 or 4 equal parts and we discovered that the parts can become new things like halves, thirds and fourths. It wasn’t easy at first splitting paper shapes into equal parts, but with a couple of tools and ideas like rulers and folding it became easier. We talked about how dividing something apart this way creates a fraction of what it was. We explored how this concept of equal parts can be applied to other things like cooking measurements.

Magical Black Cat, who gives us interesting problems to solve each week, gave us one about a wizard, 21 golden pieces, and 3 charms…a snake, a book, and a cat charm. We had to figure out how many gold pieces each one cost the witch Zildy. One of us came up with the idea to tally one at a time the gold pieces. We discovered that it was a multiplication problem and that multiplication is a fast way to add!

In ELA…

Ms. Eliza’s Readers & Writers…

We read (we’re becoming such confident readers and are enjoying reading with partners sharing books and our skills!), reviewed phonics concepts and sight words we’ve learned so far and wrote/illustrated something special we did over spring break. We read 2 special books… In A Jar and Memory Jars. Ms. Eliza shared a jar that held a memory of her dog Whiskey and she can’t wait to share the memories that our group will bring in next week!

Ms. Kim’s Group…

This week we filled out a writing survey about what we love and what we find challenging about writing.

We worked on “silent e” words.

We learned about a new genre of nonfiction writing: Biographical writing. We read a book about Jacques Cousteau and another book about a little girl’s first time walking to school without holding hands with an adult. Both books were nonfiction, one told us about the whole life of a famous person and the other was a lovely memory – we call those memory-stories “memoirs.” Alphas loved talking about the first time they did special things and we are looking forward to reading more about them!