Room 102 Week 6

Hi parents,

We had another wonderful week here in Room 102 🙂 Take a look at what we’ve been up to!

During our morning meetings this week, we started writing a class acrostic poem with the word PHILOTIMO. We will continue to write our poem next week. We are excited to share it with you! We ended the week using our class meeting time to play Last Number Standing! This is a fun way to revisit our understanding of place value.

For the past week and a half, we have been trying to solve the following mathematical challenge about eating apples. This week, we acted out the question and determined there could be multiple correct solutions! This introduced the idea of assumptions in mathematical challenges as well. Let’s see what answer you get!

On Wednesday, we spent time winding down after lunch with our new school pet, Zeus!

Throughout the week, we worked on typing our poems about our fears, creating drawings using grid paper and then determining the area of each part of the picture, and finding dates for our class timeline. We sure were busy!! Our chapter summaries had us rewriting a part of Two Roads from a different character’s perspective. The story is told by Cal, but we considered what another character in the story might be thinking or feeling and then rewrote a scene from our chapter from their point of view. Students had to use textual clues to infer the character’s opinions or thoughts.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend!

-Anna

Room 102 Week 5

Hi parents!

We had another great week here in Room 102. We were discussing on our way to recess today that summer is officially over next week! Can you believe it? Fall is already here!

Take a look at just a few of the things we’ve been up to.

This week we practiced writing our own review questions about Two Roads. This required students to determine what was most important in the chapter and then work backwards to form a question. It was challenging but so rewarding as student comments evolved from “This is really hard!” to “Look, I did it!” We also started a class timeline which will include historical events intertwined in our novel such as World War I and the Great Depression. We are currently brainstorming and researching these events to ensure accuracy on our timeline. Next week we will being Part II of our novel and we are excited to learn about Cal’s time at Challagi Indian School!

On Tuesday we were introduced to the following image and discussed the question, “How many are there?” We found MANY ways to answer this question like counting objects on the plate, counting dishes, counting seeds, etc. How many ways can you answer the question, “How many are there?”

Throughout the week we revisited our conversations about area. We wrote letters on grid paper and found their area in square units. Next week we will continue our investigation of area!

Yesterday we read the Maya Angelou poem, Life Doesn’t Frighten Me and used it as a mentor text to write our own poems after analyzing the author’s style and purpose. We wrote about our fears and about things we should be scared of but aren’t! We even chose one of Maya Angelou’s rhyming patterns to use in our own poems. These poems turned out great and now we are typing them to be published on our classroom wall.

More from the week!

See you next week!

-Anna

Room 102 Week 4

Hi parents!

It may have been a short week, but it sure didn’t feel that way with all we accomplished 🙂 Take a look at what we’ve been up to.

Throughout the week we created poster presentations to share what we learned from our heritage interviews. We used pictures and words to represent stories about our ancestors, traditions we continue for holidays, and languages we speak. I was impressed with the class’s questions of each presenter! We even taught each other things like how to say “hi” or “I love you” in other languages and asked to see pictures of family members or find countries on a map.

Tuesday’s morning challenge turned into a week-long morning challenge! We defined tessellations and then tried to find or create our own shape that would tessellate. It was tough to find a shape that didn’t overlap or leave gaps on our paper. It was also tough to be sure each shape we drew was EXACTLY the same as the shape we had drawn before. In our DynaMath magazine, we learned about the relocation of beavers and their effect on the environment. The article gave us an excellent chance to practice subtraction and regrouping!
Our class novel, Two Roads, has had us summarizing and analyzing characters using a variety of strategies. On Wednesday, we defined what it means to be an upstander and then decided if we felt Pop exemplifed that definition. We all agreed that Pop is a great example of an upstander! Then…we argued the opposite! It was a lively debate while we highlighted each of Pop’s actions and tried to convince each other that Pop was NOT actually an upstander.
This year we have been having a morning meeting to start each day. These meetings are a chance to check in and build our classroom community. Some days we share a short story and other days we take on a new challenge together! On Thursday we worked together to flip a sheet over while the whole class stood on it. It was an opportunity to practice communication and teamwork skills. We were excited to celebrate our success together and then discuss how we felt during the activity. We will continue to utilize morning meeting time to grow our positive class relationships!

More fun from the week!

Room 102 Week 3

Hi parents!

We’ve had another great week 🙂 Take a look at what we’ve been up to!

This week we practiced our visual-spacial skills. We found as many possible solutions to the question “What’s missing?” considering the pattern block picture below. It was interesting to see the range of possible solutions to one simple question! We continued using these spatial skills to build our understanding of area. We used geoboards to determine how much space is taken up by each created shape. Some students used their best estimates to measure in inches. Others used the pegs on the board to measure in “dots.” Ultimately, we decided to measure in squares which was helpful until we tried to measure shapes with diagonal lines! Piecing together partial squares proved to be an excellent challenge. Next week we will dig deeper into our understanding of area!

After watching a Mystery Science video explaining how Lego bricks were invented, we were ready to do some building ourselves! Students made marble mazes using Lego. To end the week, we watched another video clip detailing other pieces of the Lego invention story. Ask your child what they learned about Lego!

On Wednesday we introduced the idea of a mentor text. We read a poem written by a Native American author, Whose Mouth Do I Speak With by Suzanne Rancourt. We analyzed various elements of the poem such as the author’s style, word choice, and author’s purpose. Students then wrote their own poem using similar strategies.

Our novel has taken us on a train through the south, into the trenches of WWI, and into the details of our characters’ heritage. As I’m sure you know from our homework assignment, we are digging into our own heritage as well! Today we started creating presentations to share the information we learned from our interviews. I cannot wait to see the finished products!