Hello 2D Families!
It has been a wonderful two weeks of learning in our classroom. We went back to basics and chose new reading spots for Reader's Workshop and talked a lot about kindness and personal body space. The students were such hard workers for the last two weeks and I'm always so proud! Here are some highlights from our learning fun!
Reading
We've been social detectives and analyzing relationships between characters and what they tell us. The coolest part of this work has been seeing them recognize qualities of growth mindset in their characters. We had visitors during reading from all over our school district and they were blown away by the students' growth mindset vocabulary. We have been doing a lot of talking around our "read aloud character" Clementine and have found that she is very empathetic and we are now able to back up that statement with evidence.
Writing
We are cruising along with our fictional stories and the students are excited to add illustrations and title pages. We have taken the time to edit and add in detail and our own craft. The students are truly able to read their own writing and begin the editing process on their own. It is so exciting. The students love sharing their writing.
Math
This week we worked on diagrams to help us with our addition and subtraction word problem strategies. We did subtraction and addition with "start,change,end" and "part, part, total" boxes. We also learned how to jump on a numberline by 100s, 20s, 10s, 5s and 1s to help us solve word problems. Please work with your students using coins at home, this will keep it fresh in their minds until we get back to money!
Science
We have begun experimenting and our main question was: Can a solid change shape? Many students said "NO!" They were especially amazed to realize that solids CAN change shape. How did we discover this? We used something as simple as a starburst! The students each held an unwrapped starburst in their hands and then after five minutes started combining them with the person next to them. We ended up with one big starburst ball. The students were so blown away that solids can change shape, and some- like a starburst, so easily. So then it came to our big discovery! We had to ask ourselves how exactly did the starburst change shape? The students decided it was through our force and our body temperature. We began talking about the different parts of a science experiment and recorded each one to prepare for our new lab report unit that is coming up soon! The students recorded their essential question, hypothesis, materials, procedure, results and conclusion. Prior to this experiment we played with Oobleck and the students had to decide if it was a solid or a liquid and have evidence for why!
Questions to ask you Dragonfly for school/home talk:
What is your favorite word sort choice?
Where is your new reading spot?
What was your hypothesis for the starburst experiment?
Which math diagram do you prefer? "Part, Part, Total" or "Start, Change, End"?
What is the first thing you should do when you look at a math word problem?
No comments:
Post a Comment