We read Welcome To The Neighborwood together as a class and worked on identifying important facts about each animal. It also led us into a conversation about how animals in the woods depend on each other to survive. Students then took their facts and created a nonfiction piece and created woodland animals out of paper.
To deepen our understanding of needs/wants, goods/services and producers/consumers we held a Market Day event! Students were placed into "companies" and created proposals for goods and services they wanted to create and sell. They were approved by the CEO (Me!) and produced their goods and practiced their services. They created print advertisements for their products. Yesterday we held our Market Day and everyone had the opportunity to sell and purchase items. They had A LOT of fun with this!
As a culminating event for measuring length and time students engaged in the Measurement Olympics! They measured how far they could jump, how far they could throw cotton balls, how far they could blow a small pom-pom ball and organizing events in a day in time order.
Today we got to view a performance by some of our Japanese Moms! Singing, dancing and stories were so fun! This week we started learning what nouns and verbs are. We watched videos and read books to discover that nouns are people, places and things and verbs are actions. We called out things in our classroom that were nouns and played verb charades. Above we have pictures of kids showing: sleep, shop, dance and eat.
We have started talking about telling time on the clock. We are first developing our understand of how the clock is organized. Students were given one hour in the day to represent in a picture and then I asked them to work together as a team to organize those hours in a way that made sense. This launched a conversation about AM vs. PM hours and how a traditional number line goes from 1-12 but because of 12 being the time that transitions from AM to PM a clock timeline is more 12-11 and then repeats. We then transferred our clock timelines into circles and practiced telling time to the hour with our HUGE clocks!
To become familiar with another non-fiction genre I read a biography about Walt Disney and we collected facts while reading. We talked about non-fiction features such as the table of contents, headings, and captions and how they help us a readers navigate through a non-fiction text. We worked together to identify key details of Walt Disney's life that we should know. Students then worked with a partner or two to read another Walt Disney biography online using our PebbleGo.com resource and they wrote down more facts. Today I introduced to the students the Keynote app (similar to PowerPoint) and they are working with their partners to create a presentation biography about Walt Disney.
We have been up to a lot of learning about measurement recently!
First students got the idea of how to measure things effectively without overlapping or leaving gaps between measuring tools by cutting apart an inch ruler and then recreating it. Next we used cut out paper feet to measure smaller items in our classroom and then using the paper feet we created 5 "foot" measuring tools to measure larger things in the classroom. Some kids even measured each other! We then switched to using small measuring tools like the above paper ladybugs and worms. We also have be comparing sizes and ordering objects from smallest to largest and largest to smallest. Students have continued to work on writing instructional pieces called "How To" books. They are ranging from writing about cooking and baking to building with legos to how to do things like pulling teeth! This week we took a look at some craft and cooking books and realized that most directions in these types of books have some sort of introductions. Students tried their hand at writing introductions to their How To pieces of writing.
To continue our learning about changing states of matter we turned heavy cream into butter by shaking it like CRAZY in little jars! The kids had so much fun doing this (even with some of the jars dripping a little)! They were quite shocked by the results!
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May 2015
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