Hi parents!

Another awesome week here in room 104 🙂 Take a look at what we’ve been up to.

• Throughout the week we have continued our exploration of perimeter and we shared our strategies for solving last week’s snowflake math challenges!
• As we have continued reading our novel, we are starting to piece together the twisted story of Hugo Cabret! As we continue in the story, we are taking on a new project! Today we started researching landmarks in Paris, the setting of Hugo. We will be transforming our classroom into Paris! Stay tuned to see our finished artwork and learn more about each landmark!

• More new things for the week! Each student chose a chapter book to read entirely on their own! They will complete a review about the book they read as well as another project of their choosing. Everyone has been so excited to read their story and then share with the class. Your child should have brought home their book to continue reading outside of school. There is no need for this to take the place of the amazing reading you do together! However, students should plan to spend time at home reading their chapter book independently. They can complete their review and project in class OR at home. Please let me know if you have any questions!
• We ended the week with a little manual labor 😉 We started sanding down a table that is going to become a school art project! More to come!

• Thank you to all who have donated to our class food drive! It has been exciting to check the bins in the front office each day to see the donations accumulating. If you would like to send in tuna, sugar, dog food, or meal shakes for people with diabetes, good news! We are still collecting next week!
• More fun from the week!

 

Hi parents,

Between Presidents’ Day and a snow day, it’s been an interesting week! Even still, we had an awesome time with our days together!

• On Tuesday and Wednesday we watched a Mystery Science video about the noises that owls make. We then listened to various sound clues to try to identify a secret location. As we were talking about the sounds the owls make, we started discussing nocturnal animals. To follow up, each student researched an animal of their choosing to find out if it was nocturnal or diurnal. Researching our animals was a great way to practice literary and analysis skills all sparked by a topic we were interested in as a class! Ask your child what animal they chose to research 🙂
• We are loving reading Hugo! We’ve continued with our sketches and vocabulary and are hooked on the cliffhanger endings each chapter! Today we focused specifically on the figurative speech used by the author, Bryan Selznick. We then wrote and illustrated our own similes! As we’re growing as writers, we are learning new techniques to incorporate into our essays, stories, and journal entrees.
• This week we learned that snowflakes can have as few as three sides, and that they have a repeating design that gets smaller and smaller. Although we don’t yet have our class answers for each of our challenge questions, I have been impressed by everyone’s willingness to try again and again! Students have drawn pictures of the snowflakes mentioned in the challenge and when they run out of room, they have continued the drawings on the back of the paper. Students have turned in their responses and then asked for their paper back to make updates after they heard another student’s strategy. What excellent efforts from the mathematicians in our class! Make sure you and your mathematician get outside this weekend to look at some of the beautiful snowflakes and their detailed designs! At recess, we learned that the fluffy snow we had this week is perfect for seeing each individual snowflake just like the photographer in our math challenge! Check it out!

• Like every week, we also took time to learn problem-solving techniques, number sense, and even how to count money through playing games with each other.

Have a great weekend!

-Anna

Hi parents!

We have had a great week here in Room 104 🙂

• On Monday we wrote stories including as many of our vocabulary words as we could. On Tuesday and Thursday, we created our own silent films by acting out and recording our performances of our stories. The challenge was that we couldn’t use any words or sounds! It’s harder to express emotions or tell a story with no sounds than we thought! However, it was a great way to connect with our vocabulary words in a new way.
• The weather was too cold to spend much time outside for recess so we had some other creative challenges throughout the week. On Monday we decorated bags for Valentine’s treats for a local nursing home.  This was a fun service project organized by Ms. Demetra’s class but the whole school was able to participate. On Tuesday we used geoboards to create different shapes with rubber bands. We wrote our name with shapes on the board and then made nonagons! The nonagon challenge stumped many people in the class, but I was so proud of everyone’s willingness to keep trying! Some people continued their efforts the next day until they finally successfully created a nonagon! What an accomplishment! We also had fun making our own shapes and patterns with the rubberbands. On Thursday we completed a building challenge. Part of each group built a structure and wrote down detailed instructions to recreate their design. The other part of the group tried to rebuild the same structure using only the directions from their group mates.

• On Wednesday we experimented with bubbles in the cold! Ask your kids what happened when they caught a bubble on their wand! The class then decided to extend the experiment by leaving the bubble solution outside overnight. We made predictions and liked checking back on our bubble solution ice cubes as they slowly returned to their original state.

• We ended the week with some Valentine’s themed learning! We learned about flowers blooming and the sizes of animals’ hearts!

<We found objects the same size as a hyena’s heart!

• Other fun from the week.

Have a great long weekend! See you next week 🙂

Hi parents!

We are officially in that winter weather! Brr! Take a look at what we’ve been up to this week 🙂

• We are loving reading Hugo! After each chapter, we make our own pencil sketch to highlight the main events. In addition to our new sketching techniques, we are learning new vocabulary. Ask your child how much snow accumulated last night! Hugo’s work with clocks has inspired us to learn about telling time and we are making connections with time in general. On Thursday, we took on the challenge to determine how many hours are in a school year! So far we have determine how many hours are in a school day and we poured over the school calendar to determine how many days we have in a school year. We’ll let you know when we have our final answer! We ended the week watching a silent film, A Trip to the Moon, just like Hugo watched when he was a young kid. Next week we’ll continue these explorations as we follow Hugo’s search for his notebook and the answers from his automaton.

• This week we have been building on last week’s exploration of perimeter. We are working to find as many different rectangles with a perimeter of 36 units. I am loving watching each group’s different approach. Some used unifix cubes to grapple with why 36 cubes outlining a rectangle doesn’t make a perimeter of 36 units. Other groups used the graph paper to draw, erase, and draw again! Next week we will combine our ideas and look for patterns.
• We are busy working on writing our first persuasive essay! Each student has picked out something that they believe is art but that most people would not think of as art. Stay tuned and be prepared to be convinced! 🙂
• More fun from the week

Stay warm this weekend!!

-Anna