Phew! We have been busy! The last couple of weeks, we have been adding to our knowledge of rocks and minerals. We watched a pretty silly Bill Nye on erosion, in preparation for a STEM we have planned for this upcoming week!
In math, we have been solving number stories using different strategies, either part part total, or change to diagrams. This helps the children to identify the important information in a word problem, and organize it in a way that makes it easier for them to solve, accurately! They have done a great job with this! We will continue to use these strategies for subtraction number stories, as well.
In Wonders, we worked on visualizing with poetry. We also identified different characteristics of poetry, such as similes, alliteration, free verse and rhyming words. Last week we read some realistic fiction texts, in both whole group and small group. The children made some great text-to-self connections to the stories. We have been celebrating kindness throughout the month of March, and many of the stories we read had the theme of being a good citizen. It was nice to hear the children share personal stories that connected these two themes!
We finally fit in some Valentine’s activities that we couldn’t get to during Valentine’s week. The children had lots of fun sorting, measuring, graphing and solving word problems with candies! Some of the children practiced with coordinate grids by playing conversation heart battleship!
We finally finished our states of matter unit with a pretty great experiment! We blew up some balloons, by creating a gas. It was so much fun watching the children’s reactions!
We had tons of fun at the Read-a-thon!
We painted kindness rocks with Mrs.Brown!
We painted hearts and hands for the Silver Graphics!
For St. Patrick’s Day, we worked on a STEAM project for those tricky leprechauns! We read some stories, and then had a division between those that wanted to try and “trap” their leprechaun, and those that made some homes, or playgrounds for the leprechauns. We read some stories where the leprechauns got pretty frustrated with traps, and made big messes, so most of the class opted to be kind to the leprechauns, and it seemed to work, as the leprechauns left everyone (even the trap setters) some treats!
Last week, we worked on sorting “expected” and “unexpected” behaviors. This is the language we use with the children to help them make good choices. This was an interesting activity, because we then talked about how we feel when we see an unexpected behavior. The children had some very different feelings, and we talked about how that it is good to know this, so we don’t assume that everyone has the same feelings as us. For example, how would you feel if you saw someone walking backward on the sidewalk? Feelings ranged from silly, confused, to scared, that they would walk into the street.
Finally, our class was recognized by our book buddies, for having some outstanding reading! We helped to create a movie that kicked off the reading challenge for the school! I will upload a video as soon as I get one!
