Weekly wrap-up.

Hello blog-readers!  We had a very eventful week this week, there was so much happening.  We finished our Habitat mini-courses, created some opinion writing, started working with multiplication, sorted Legos, finished up our inquiry based electricity unit, and had our most successful group-juggle.

For the last few weeks we have been working on Habitat mini-courses.  All of the students participated in learning about and creating different habitats throughout our school.  It was so terrific to see many of you on Tuesday night for our tour, and everyone learned so much throughout this investigation.

We have begun to revisit the opinion writing genre.  We will be focusing on expressing our claim, and backing it up with evidence.  Currently students are working on stating their claim about which of our inquiries students liked the best, and are working to gather and express evidence that supports their claims. 
Students are also working on using transitional words in their writing, rather than creating a list of things they like.

In math we are beginning to work with the pattern of multiplication.  We have been using four strategies to help solve multiplication questions.  Ask your student which strategy is their favorite (mine is #4: the picture strategy).

Legos, Legos, everywhere, but only there to sort.  We are beginning a new education technology workshop and will be creating Lego robots with Arlyn.  Through this investigation we will practice collaboration and problem solving, as well as design technology.  Our first end product will be a pair of dancing birds.  The first step to creating the dancing birds is to sort the Legos systematically, and each partnership did that today.  We now have 8 nicely sorted kits, and one (mine) that still needs to be.

We are nearing the end of our inquiry-based unit focused on electricity.  Students have worked together to create circuits.  Throughout this unit we have worked on reflection and experiential learning as students have been given a list of materials and a goal, and all of them have seen success creating working circuits that incorporate switch and series power sources.  For more information check with your student, and check out the photos below!

Finally we had our most successful group juggle of the year this week!  The group juggle is one of our morning meeting activities.  We have an activity every day and they are designed to bring fun, teamwork, concentration, and cooperation to our class.  For complete details on how the group juggle works ask your student, the quick version is as follows: students are in our meeting circle tossing balls to one another in a pattern, thus far we have had 4 balls flying at once!

We had a great week, and are looking forward to the next!

today we had music. we are reading the hobbit. the hobbit is good you shoud read it.                                                                                                                                        my name is riley                                                                                                                 

Our continued inquiry...

We have continued work on our inquiry about electricity.  Throughout this work there has been incredible teamwork, patience, and learning in our class.  All students are diving into creating circuits, and are working on figuring out how to allow electricity flow through circuits.

We have also been working hard and investigating different shapes during math.  We have worked with triangles and quadrilaterals.  We have learned some of the different attributes of these sorts of shapes.  We have also been working on different vocabulary words associated with different shapes.  Ask your students some of the attributes of triangles and quadrilaterals, as well as what a vertex is, and perhaps even the plural of vertex!

During our literacy time we have continued to work on reading comprehension strategies in book clubs.  We are working on comprehension using short books, as well as reading in the Hobbit.  The Hobbit is a story full of rich characters, and (as Mally pointed out today) lots of turning points.  Ask your student where we are in this story, as well as where we are on the map below!  We have also been working on a couple different writing pieces.  One is an essay where students made observations and subsequently wrote about what that reminded them of.  The other is a piece of non-fiction writing explaining how they solved one of our electricity inquiries.  We also have restarted some explicit instruction in spelling, for the last few weeks spelling instruction has been embedded into writer's workshop, and it is time for it to make a reemergence. 

I hope the weekend is restful and fun, and if you ever need to contact me, please drop me an email at: dwillard@u32.org.

i had a fun day.

THE WET WET DAY. by Jasmine

Today at recess I got completely and totally wet.

I enjoyed the  whole day
.

Writing from Drawings

Today we worked on creating pieces of writing from drawings!

Often times students create a piece of writing first and illustrate it second.  In this strategy, students create an illustration, leave if alone overnight, and return to create the story the next day.  Using this technique students must focus on the details in the illustration for inspiration in their writing.  Check out some of the illustrations below!

Area!

During math we have been working on area.  To this end we have been creating shapes with other shapes.  In the following photos students are working with three different shapes all of which have different areas.  The squares they are using have an area of 1, the large triangles also have an area of 1, and the small triangles have an area of 1/2.  Check out these photos, and ask your student what shapes they made, and what area they were.