Math
Ms. Kelly’s math group has been working so hard on their Unit One learning that they officially wrapped it up with a post assessment and are ready for Unit Two, all about Place Value! This group has really enjoyed playing math games with partners – games are such an awesome way to reinforce our learning! They ended the week with a quick pre-assessment for Unit Two. Way to go, mathematicians!
Ms. Skylar’s math group worked diligently on wrapping up their unit on Place Value, post assessments coming soon! The kids in this group have been LOVING shape challenges as warm-ups, they are getting quite good at them and we love to see higher levels of thinking and problem solving to warm their math brains up! This group has taken their knowledge of standard, expanded and word forms and has applied it in so many different ways, including some tricky word problems! As students have become more comfortable with this content, Ms. Skylar has put a big emphasis on reading each question and direction CAREFULLY, because we work with big numbers that often look very similar to each other. With cool math games as a reinforcer, the kids are able to order VERY large numbers from least to greatest and greatest to least with ease! Well done, Mathletes! Time to move onto Unit Two!
Literacy
We sure do love literacy! The kids really enjoy being word detectives and punctuation patrol during our News and Announcements time – fixing teacher “mistakes” is FUN!
Phonics, book clubs, and word sorts OH MY! Those were just a few of our focuses this week – SO much literacy is happening on a daily basis! Ms. Kelly continued to make phonics fun and exciting with consonant blend games, board games with r-controlled vowels and high frequency word “Go-Fish”. Ms. Skylar’s book clubs are cozy and calm with interesting discussions, thorough responses and kids being brave by reading their chapter books aloud. These Beta’s have been focusing on sentence structure by unscrambling scrambled up sentences AND reading them with various types of punctuation to see how they can sound different. Their inflection when reading sentences with a period, exclamation point and question mark was SPOT ON! We have such an imaginative group – their first writing piece is a paragraph about an imaginary invention, each and every idea is so unique! They must be sure that their sentences are clear and state what they want to convey. Some kiddos finished their first drafts and were able to have their work edited by the teacher – very official!
Theme
Move over magnetism and hello electricity! We began our week talking about atoms and their make up, adding to our Travel Journals with our findings. The kids’ interest was “sparked” when they noticed some balloons in our classroom…they were thrilled to be able to use them during our lessons on static electricity! As all good scientists do, first we made predictions about what types of hair would stand up the best and then which surfaces our balloons would stick to after charging them up with our hair. We did several other experiments (Videos on our Insta) to see what types of materials could be picked up/moved/manipulated with static electricity – it was AWESOME! On Monday we will begin working with batteries so we finished out our week learning all about electrons and how they work!
We had such a great week! :)
