Room 102 Week 3 | Ms. Anna W.'s Class

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!