This week we worked with designing a roof that would keep out the rain! Students learned what an architect does and discovered that roofs need to be slanted so that the water doesn't pool up. They also learned that there needs to be a protector to keep the water from seeping through cracks, like vinyl!
Students learned about 3D shapes with faces, edges, and vertices on both a traditional 3x3 cube as well as a 2x2 cube. We practiced trying to solve the cube and discussed the volume of the shape as well.
Today we explored different wings types on planes to see how far they would travel! We talked about lift and where the wings should go on a plane in order for it fly the farthest with the launcher!
In third grade math, we have been working on our dream houses. Student started with a 2D blueprint where they identified the perimeter and area of each of the rooms in their dream house. Today we are working on making it 3-D.
Our students did such a nice job with their Jack and the Beanstalk activities! I introduced the Jack and the Beanstalk story by Steven Kellogg in small group and the students participated in a socratic seminar on the story that focused on right and wrong. The following week in Mrs. Denton's classroom, my students read two versions of Jack and the beanstalk - one from jack's point of view and one from the Giant's point of view. When we came back together, we worked on a Reader's Theater script from yet another version of Jack and the Beanstalk. Students created props and performed the skit for the rest of their classmates! I have enjoyed working with kindergarten over the past few months!
Here are some updates: Each kindergarten class joined me for a coding lesson using Pixel the dog on tynker.com in December and January. At the beginning of February, I pulled a group of students from Mrs. Harwood's class. We wrote about a topic they were interested in (most of them chose what they wanted to be when they grow up) and then recorded ourselves with pictures on the iPad app Educreations. I also started a pull out group with students from each of the four kindergarten classes. Our focus was working on analogies. Students watched some videos on analogies, worked with pictures forming relationships, and did some activity pages with analogies. I loved getting to know some of our kindergarten friends! Next, in Mrs. Goolsby's class we worked with a really neat instructional technology tool called "plickers." Students answered questions identifying different types of coins and held up premade "plicker" cards in order to tell us what coin they thought it was! The students really enjoyed this activity! One activity that we did was related to a nonfiction text about Symbols which tied in to the students' social studies curriculum. We focused on the Washington Monument and identified all the facts about the monument. We identified which ones we thought were the most important and wrote them on a model Washington Monument that we made into a 3-D model.
We also read a poem about "Delilah" that did not let us know what type of being Delilah was and had many similes included in it. After talking about what a simile is, we had to use context clues and make an inference using what we already know about different animals. Students then had to create their own poem in the same fashion as "Delilah"! We read the story "Andy's new house" and designed a home that each students would like to have. Then each students wrote a descriptive piece of writing about their dream house. We used color coded paragraphs to help students focus on the main idea, details, and description of the details. We worked with “Goldie Blox” to learn about simple machines and engineering. Goldie Blox is a character in a story that comes from a family of engineers. She likes to solve problems. Her stories are in rhyme format and give the students tasks to complete using the machine parts: wheel, axle, "blox", and washers. First students explored how to make Nacho the Dog and his friends spin and then they will get to explore different machines they can make with the same materials!
We started our LA times after assessment were completed. Each month I will visit with a different group of students from each of the second grade classrooms. This month, we have explored the story “Many Moons,” a Caldecott Winner. Students worked on activities that elicited recall information and then chose a synthesis, analysis, or evaluation activity. Most of the second graders chose to draw a trophy for the court jester for capturing the moon for Lenore!
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