While learning about polar bears and penguins we learned that both animals have blubber as an adaption to help them stay warm in such frigid temperatures. To help us better understand this we stuck our hands in ice cold water for a few seconds. Then we placed our hands in a "blubber" glove (ziplock bag with tons of Crisco - don't worry their hands didn't touch the crisco!) and put it in ice cold water. The kids were able to feel the difference the layer of "blubber" makes!
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Lots and Lots and Lots of fun centered around reading is happening right now!
March Book Madness - We are participating with other classrooms around the nation in a bracket style competition between books published in 2014 and books that were published before 2014. Each week we will be voting between books and then entering our winners. Then the new bracket will roll out and we will continue voting! We can't wait to see who wins the 2015 "Road To Bookville" :) Through this we are getting to experience many new stories! If you would like to check out more about this please head to: http://marchbookmadness.weebly.com/ Read Across America - Next week we will be celebrating Read Across America week. Our theme is "Feeding Our Minds While Feeding Others". We will be feeding our minds through reading and then feeding others through our food drive. More information has been emailed to you and is coming home today in a handout. Mac Barnett - Author Mac Barnett is coming to SCE on March 9th and we are preparing for his arrival through celebrating his books throughout Read Across America. He also has a book that is part of the March Book Madness! We continued to practice our understanding of comparing and understanding relationships between numbers 0-120 by playing Mystery Number using an open number line. W drew an empty number line and then placed a mystery mark where our number would be on that number line. Then a partner would make guesses as to what the mystery number was and their guesses were marked according to where they were located on the number line compared to where the mystery number was located. Students then used their incorrect guesses to help them make more educated guesses as to what the mystery number was.
This is a great game to play at home! We have been enjoying books involving fictional penguin characters like Tacky and Sergio and identifying the problems and solutions in the stories. We are now moving towards being able to identify similarities and differences between the two books. Students worked with partners to complete Venn Diagrams to show their understanding of comparing and contrasting stories.
Students played the game "Finding Neighbors" this week to help develop their understanding of tens and ones place value as well as the relationship between numbers on a 99 chart (this chart goes 0-99). Students physically built a number they spun on a spinner using base ten blocks so they could manipulate the number (above picture shows 74). They then had to find the space that number belongs in on the 99 chart using their knowledge of tens and ones place value. Then they had to find that number's "neighbors" on the 99 chart - the number to the right (+1), the number to the left (-1), the number below (+10), and the number above (-10). This helps them start to develop the ability to mentally add and subtract by one and multiples of ten.
My heart has been melting as I have been working with the kids this week on constructing their Kindness Cards for Valentine's Day! They are being so thoughtful about each individual and selecting a compliment that goes with each child in the class. We brainstormed a list of compliments they could write to each other to help them get their thinking started about what they could write.
Well....sometimes my ideas come back and get me :)
Due to our amazing abilities to write persuasively next Friday we will be heading outside to play in the snow! We are getting into some class conversations about how we can use our knowledge of the tens and ones to help us understand the value of a number. We can then use that knowledge to help us compare numbers to one another.
Kids had 1 minute to draw as many pictures of something they could and then they were asked to count how many they drew. We continue to revisit the idea of counting larger quantities of objects is faster and easier if you group them by tens first. Students then compared their total amounts to each other to create a number line of our final counts. This led them to understand when comparing numbers to first look at the tens place value and then the ones place value. In another activity students were given a set of numbers to compare and put in order. They then had to decide which 2 numbers were the closest together. This led to a lot of discussions about counting forwards and backwards on a number line or in their head to find the answer. Students then had to work to figure out which of the 3 numbers was farthest from 50 and which was farthest from 100. If students understood this it was the icing on the cake as it was a challenging question put forward to them to try. We were so lucky to have Carrie Pratt, a parent at our school, from the Columbus Zoo come and speak to all the first graders about Polar Bears today!
She shared with us how different parts of the Polar Bear help them survive and thrive in their environment. She also talked with us about how they care of the Polar Bears at the zoo. Ask your child to tell you about the above pictures to help them share with you about this experience! We took a close look at this picture today and thought about all the math in this picture. Below are all the questions we came up with:
How many groups of ten are there? - Graycen How many Legos are there all together? - Isabella How many buildings are there? - Leo How many of each color are there? - Emma How many people are there? - Brylee How much did all those Legos cost? - Lina Did they use more than 12 wheels? - Leah What temperature is it where they built it? - Amy How many cars? - Trent How many people are in the buildings? - Kevin Are there more people on the ground or in the buildings? - Mrs. Brothers How many groups of one are there? - Madison How many people are in the cars? - Alex How many people built this? - Chase |
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May 2015
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