Friday Already

Four days...and it's Friday

Class Note: If anyone has an unused 4" binder laying around the house, would you be willing to donate it to our class? 

Word of the week: INTEGRITY, the quality of being honest.

1^st Grade LA

ANAGRAM PUZZLES: With just one class this week we continued our anagram puzzles. The students who were here last week were unable to complete them, the students who missed never started. This lesson worked out great. The students who were able to work on this packet last week got to the “challenge” section today, words with 5 or more letters. The students just beginning were able to get a good start. I have kept the puzzles and letter cut outs in class for the students to work on if there is down time. HOMEWORK: Handout 6.8 was sent home and to be returned Monday February 27^th.

1^st Grade MA

TARGET PRACTICE: The past two days we have discussed area. We looked at different target shapes the students designed and decided why certain targets would be easier to hit than others. We realized that shape AND area play a very important role. We had fun tossing magnets and wet pom-poms at a few of the targets they designed. We ended Thursday by beginning our Think Deeply over this lesson. We will finish it next week.

2^nd Grade LA

SOCRATIC SEMINAR: Our last and final lesson on Edward Tulane. This was a great recap to end our Edward Journey. The class was divided into two groups. There was an inner circle and an outer circle. The inner circle was asked questions about the story. They were not telling me the answers; they were discussing them to each other. While the inner circle was talking, the outer circle was listening. The outer circle needed to write down 2 stars, a star was something they thought the inner circle covered very well. The outer circle needed to write a wish as well. A wish was something they wished was covered a little more clear or detailed by the inner circle. Last, the outer circle needed to write a light bulb idea. A light bulb idea or an interesting idea, was something the inner circle discussed that someone in the outer circle never thought about or looked at in that perspective.

2^nd Grade MA

SLEEPING BAG ESTIMATES: Starting with a little review, we continued on trying to find the perfect sleeping bag area for a second grader. The class gave me a high and low estimate of how many square feet they believe to be the perfect size for a sleeping bag. Once we measured them out we tried again. And again we found one was too small and one was too large. After our two trial and errors, and seeing what length and width worked best, we believed to have found the perfect size, 18 square feet, 3 feet X 6 feet.

3^rd Grade LA

FABLE GRAMMAR: Tuesday we dissected the fable “The Lion and the Mouse” looking for nouns, verbs, and adjectives. We then looked at simple sentences and their elements.

3^rd Grade MA

We did not meet Wednesday because of third grade field trip.

AREA: On Thursday we finished figuring the area of our body tracings. We reviewed more efficient ways to find the area of a large space. Many of the students were counting every square vs. finding the fast area of large squares or rectangles. The students also needed to count all the partial squares, and then decide as a group how they would add them to the total area.

4^th Grade LA

PREZI: We are coming to the last steps of our Change Maker project. The students are to be working on their Prezi, basically a slide show. They will use their time line photos, along with other ones if they wish. This will be shown in the background as they read their monologues. Please continue to have your child practice their monologue at home. This needs to be memorized by the time of their presentation. Presentation dates are set for March 6^th and 7^th.

If your child is NOT done with their Prezi, it can be worked on at home. Simply go to www.prezi.com, the email login is JBosHA4@gmail.com and the password is 4gradela.

4^th Grade MA

JUST DOGGIN’ IT & KAHOOT: This week the students worked on a ‘Just Doggin’ It’ worksheet. The directions were to ONLY use translation and reflection to move the dog like shape. The shape started in box A and had to move 5 places. After the 5 moves using translation and reflection, the dog like shape needed to end in the same orientation as it started. They will be using this again next week for their Think Deeply. Thursday they played a transformation review game on Kahoot. Kahoot is always a nice change up for learning!!

Long weekend

OUR LONG WEEKEND IS ALMOST OVER

Kindergarten and Second Grade CogAT Testing

In Indiana, we identify students who qualify for high ability in reading/language arts and/or math. CogAT is a test which has zero reading.  This test identifies your out-of-the-box thinkers . . . those who are able to make connections. Students who scored a 77+ on the screener go on to take the full CogAT test. Students who score in the 95th percentile or higher on the full CogAT test will be identified as High Ability. Remember, this is only one of two pathways into high ability.  For part two of the identification process, we will use the end of the year NWEA scores.  NWEA will identify those students who are performing above grade level . . .are high readers; 95th percentile is used again.  Students do not need to score high on both tests and often times do not.

Kindergarten has finished their screener test and we are almost done with our full testers. Those who scored in the 95^th percentile will begin HA towards the end of kindergarten.  They will be seen for about six weeks.  If a kindergartener scores in the 95^th percentile on their end of the year NWEA they will begin HA in first grade.

The window for screening all second grade will be from February 27th-March 10th. Students who scored a 77+ on the screener, will then take the full test in the upcoming weeks. The results from the upcoming second grade data may change since kindergarten.  In the past,  the HA class lists tend to shake up a bit going from second to third grade; some students may move out while new ones may move in. 

If you have questions, please feel free to email me.

1^st Grade LA

Anagram puzzles: We had a crazy start to our week. Monday morning I was out of the building and Tuesday we had a number of students missing because of a schedule conflict. With the time and student I did have, we worked on anagram puzzles. We cut out letters and had to rearrange them to make a new word to solve the riddle. I will have a packet of these puzzles for the students to take home if they missed class. They were fun to do.

1^st Grade MA

Target area: The students had to draw a target using no more than 8 square units. They needed to cut these out and place them in the middle of their table, grid side down. The 2 tables then needed to arrange them in order from what they believed to be the smallest area to the largest area. Next, we used inch tiles to see if their guesses were correct. Next week we will discuss how targets can have the same area but be different shapes. Leading to how size and shape can make a target easy or tricky.

2^nd Grade LA

Poetry Café: With some of our students missing for the poetry café this week I didn’t want to start our new lesson. On Wednesday we reviewed metaphors that related to The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. We read a sentence such as “The course of true love never did run smooth”, then try to figure out what it meant. Once we understood the meaning we needed to see how it related or connected to Edward’s journey. We decided it meant there are always bumps in the road of love. I had to help the second graders with this idea of ‘love’....a little bit ;) . We then connected it to Edward because whenever her found love in a person or family, there was a bump in the road that separated them. This bump, while at the times seemed heartbreaking, always brought him a new home and a deeper way to love. Thursday we worked on a metaphor worksheet. The students had to match the metaphors with the meaning and then were able to draw pictures of the different metaphors. We went over this worksheet in class and the students were able to take it home.

2^nd Grade MA

Old and New: On Monday the students took a Chapter Check-up test. This was a test over everything we’ve covered so far this year. I will grade these and return them next week. Tuesday we started learning about area in our new chapter. We also touched up on estimating. The students needed to estimate how many square feet it would take to sleep comfortably in a sleeping bag. We used 12X12 inch sheets of paper to help visualize the estimating process.

3^rd Grade LA

Fables and Habits: On Tuesday the students read fables their classmates wrote. They then filled out a Fable Structure Story Map. The students needed to write the beginning, middle, and end of the fable they read. They then needed draw a picture of each stage in the fable and tell what moral it included. The students also needed to decide which of the 7 Habits the fable’s moral represented. Two of the students did NOT finish their fables and had to return to class. I do not assign homework unless is does not get done in class. More times than not, this is because time is not being used wisely. Please speak with your student and let them know, just because there are no grades in HA, does not mean assignment don’t need to be finished.

3^rd Grade MA

Area: This week we finished outlining our 3 students and began counting the area of their outline. We started with wrapping paper that had a 1 square inch grid on the reverse side. A student would then lie down to be traced. Once the student was traced, their group used either a 4”X4” or 5”X5” square piece of paper as a benchmark to give an estimate of the total area. Next, we divided the body outline and started counting actual area. We will finish this next week.

4^th Grade LA

Monologues DUE: We spent the week working on our monologues. These are due February 28^th and NO MORE class time will be given for them. The monologues will need to be memorized and last between 1 minuet and 30 seconds and 2 minutes. The students are to use their time line as a guide, then add detail to the events. I stressed they should NOT assume we know anything about their change maker’s life. All the events they speak on need to have great DETAIL. I asked everyone to read their monologues to someone over the weekend. This is to practice timing, eye contact, voice volume and to ensure there is enough detail….Yes, I am stressing the need for detail!!

4^th Grade MA

Shape Up: Wednesday and Thursday we played the game ‘Shape Up’. This game is an amazing review of the forms of ‘transformations’. The students not only needed to know all of the definitions to play, but also had to use visualization and spatial reasoning.

            

Look into the Past

Look into the past……

What we did 2 weeks ago

1^st Grade LA

Word Magic: During the week we discussed how anagrams are like magic. We saw how anagrams have the ability to change a word like ‘aunt’ into ‘tuna’ or ‘Mrs. Eton’ into ‘monster’. We read a very cute book called The Great Show and Tell Disaster. This book is filled with silly anagrams. The students absolutely loved it!

1^st Grade MA

Area: We are continuing our study on area. The students have been working with targets for our Pom-Pom toss game. We looked at targets they designed using 4 square units. We thought about what kind of target we would rather toss a ball at, a square one or a long rectangular one, and why? Before this week, all of our targets had the same square units. On Tuesday we looked at targets with different square units and discussed why and how a target with a smaller square unit may be easier to hit with a ball. Students needed to realize, just because a target has a larger area does not men it will be easier to hit. This brings the students back to our square vs. rectangle discussion.

2^nd Grade LA

Good Bye Edward: Last week we finished up our Edward Tulane book and lesson. The students finished their crossword puzzle and gave me a list of 10 words they correlated with The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. On Thursday all the students wrote in wrote in their journals. I had them tell me what lesson they learned from Edward and provide an example. I also had them write which one of the ‘7 Habits’ Edward learned during his journey and provide an example of this too.

2^nd Grade MA

Think Deeply: In math we ended lesson 3 ‘Car Seats for Egg Passengers’. In this think deeply the students needed to tell me what they would change about their car seat design and why. I will be looking for changes made based on the experiment results. Next, they needed to draw a prototype of a new car seat design using exactly 40 cm of material. They had to include how much of each material was used for the new car seat. I will be looking to make sure students labeled their new prototypes correctly.

3^rd Grade LA

Finishing Fables: We made a large Folk Tale definition book a few months ago. Each time we study a new folk tale we write the definition, including its elements, along with examples of it, in our book. We then began to write our own fable. The students were given a few different fable writing maps to use as guides along with a check list. I can’t wait to see what their imaginations came up with.

3^rd Grade MA

Area: This week we back tracked a little, mainly because I skipped a lesson. We all have those weeks!! We are still studying area, more specifically, the area of odd shapes. The students drew a sunny side up egg on square centimeter grid paper. I then asked them to find the area. The purpose of this was to see what methods the students used to figure out the area of full and partial square units. This is our stepping stone for next week.

4^th Grade LA

TIME LINES: Time lines SHOULD HAVE BEEN turned in and we will be working on our monologues. The monologues will need to be memorized and last between 1.5-2 minutes long. These will be read while the student’s slide show is going on behind them.The students will use their time line as a guide for their monologue. They will need to add more detailed information about their time line events as they speak to the class.

4^th Grade MA

Rotation: This week studied the last of the three transformations, rotation. The students worked on the worksheet “Turn Me Around”. This worksheet had the students start with a shape, an arrow or an “L”. They then needed to rotate it a given degree stated on the pater. I had them mentally manipulate the shapes before cutting actual shapes out to make sure they were correct. We discussed what strategies they used for rotating the shapes in their head.  A strategy we discussed was to focus on a point or a vertex of the shape. Some find it easier to imagine rotating a point vs. the entire shape.  

A Recap of Our Week

1^st Grade LA

Anagrams: We only met on Tuesday this week, starting Lesson 6, Alphabet Acrobats-Magical Connections. We began the class by trying to decipher a message written using mirror writing. At first, the students did not understand how a mirror was going to help them read a message. It only took a couple of minutes for these guys to figure it out. We learned that Leonardo da Vinci wrote some of his ideas for his inventions using mirror writing. While we don’t know for sure why, it’s believed he wanted to make it harder for people to read his notes or steal his designs. Next, went over our ‘PTOS’ homework. We made a list of the words everyone came up with: stop, tops, spot, pots and post. We ended our day with a question, how are anagrams like magic? This is where we will take off next week.

1^st Grade MA

Area: We started a new chapter introducing the concept of area. The students were given 2 different size placemats and had to decide which one had more space, ‘area’ to eat a snack on. One placemat was a rectangle while the other was a square. The students went around the room telling me why one had more area than the other. I gave each table post-it notes to fill in the placemats. This offered the students a visual to see the difference in area between the two. Some of the students were a little surprised. Tuesday, we compared two different targets for a Pom-Pom game toss we will play later. They were given 1 square inch foam pieces to find the area of the targets. This allowed them to see targets with different shapes can have the same area. We then glued 4, 1 square inch pieces of paper to create our own targets.

2^nd Grade LA

WE FINISHED: Wednesday, before we read the last chapter of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, we answered our ‘7 questions’ for the last time. These are questions we answered before we read the book, in the middle of the book and before we read the last chapter. Next week we will look at how much our answers have changed as we read. We then read the LAST CHAPTER!!!! It was a great ending! I won’t give it away, but I’m sure if you ask your child they would love to tell you how it ended. Thursday was a fun day. We worked on a Edward Tulane crossword as a class. It was a great review of the book.

2^nd Grade MA

*CRASH TEST VIDEOS ARE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE BLOG*

We crashed our eggs!!: We finally we able to test our car seats and see if they would protect our eggs. All the car seats were a success! In order for a car seat to be considered a success 2 criteria’s needed to be met. First, the car seat needed to stay secured in the truck. Second, the egg needed to stay secured in the car seat. After our crash tests, we discussed what a “Consumer Report” would say about our car seats. We talked about cost based on the amount of material a group used. We also discussed ‘ease of car seat use’. This meant how easily one could get the egg into the car seat. The last criteria we looked at on the consumer report was the ‘fit to vehicle’. This means, how easy was it to get the car seat into the truck. Out of 3 stars, all of our car seats received a 2 star rating. We decided that while they all “passed” the crash test, there were elements we could have improved on based on ideas from the other groups. 

  

3^rd Grade LA

Fables: Only meeting Tuesday, we continued our lesson on Fables. We read “The Lion and the Mouse” and filled out a reading analyzer. While filling out the reading analyzer, the students did any amazing job relating the main idea of the fable to some of our 7 Habits. They made this connection completely on their own!! So proud of them!!! It’s now a game to see how many habits we can relate to a fable.

3^rd Grade MA

Area: On Wednesday we started looking at area. We practiced finding the area of a rectangle. We looked at two different ways to find area, multiplying length by width and adding the square units. We then learned how to ‘partition’, section off, a rectangle. We practiced finding the area for the two NEW rectangles. Thursday was a crazy kind of day. While we started the next lesson in math, we ended with me introducing the game of Sets to the students. This math game is an out of the box thinking game and so much fun. I actually took it home over winter break to play it with my kids. Sometimes, we just need a little break, and that’s what we did!

4^th Grade LA

Timelines were DUE THIS WEEK!!!!! I only received 3 of the 12 students timelines. I told the students they could take them home to finish, no one did. Unfortunately I can NOT give any more class time to finish them. We must move on with our project. I will email you if your child does not have it completed.

4^th Grade MA

Do you see what I see? : We have started a new chapter on spatial visualization. Wednesday and Thursday we were introduced to new vocabulary and the three types of transformation. We learned and practiced translation, sliding the same point of a figure the same distance in the same direction. We started with a star on a grid, a student needed to direct us how to get to it. We then realized when describing translation we need: a starting point, the direction of the translation (left, right, up or down) and the distance (e.g. one space). Next, we learned about reflection, a transformation that flips a figure over a line (line of reflection). In class we worked on a worksheet that showed a trapezoid and a line of reflection. The students needed to describe and draw the reflection. Doing this required them to give the direction of the reflection (up, down, left or right) and say if the line of reflection was horizontal or vertical. Our last transformation we touched on was rotation, turning a figure about a fixed point at a given amount in a specific direction. Doing a class exercise, I gave the students non-specific rotation directions. I had them stand facing one direction. I told them to turn around, turn clockwise, turn halfway, and turn 90 degrees. Needless to say, they all ended in different directions. We now know the importance of rotation direction (clockwise, counterclockwise), amount of rotation (90, 180, 270 or 360 degrees) and the point of rotation (inside, outside, or on). The point of rotation is where we will begin next week.


2ND GRADE CRASH TESTS
*All of the videos are unlisted, unsearchable on You Tube. No one can see them unless they have the link.*

Last Week's Recap

1^st Grade LA

Word Ladders, connecting letters and language: This week we finished up lesson 5 with Word Ladders. Word ladders help the students with word recognition, spelling and vocabulary. A word ladder works by starting with one word. For every step you can only change one letter, each step must make a real word, proper nouns are not allowed. The number of steps it takes to get from the beginning word to the last depends on the number of blank spaces. In this example, we will go from FLY to CRY in one step. Changing the “L” to an “R” creating the word FRY. Once we have FRY we change the “F” to “C” taking us to CRY. That is called a one step ladder. We also worked on two step ladders. Students were able to take a packet of word ladders home if they wished. If you would like to see a packet, I have extras.

1^st Grade MA

Chapter Check-up: At the beginning of the year I gave all the students a Unit Assessment. This ‘test’ was used to see what students knew about concepts we would be going over though out the year. Wednesday and Thursday were spent taking the Chapter Check-up. This test will show me how well the students understood the concepts we’ve learned so far. This weekend I graded the chapter checkups. I will compare these to the Unit Assessments, and hopefully get them back to you next week.

2^nd Grade LA

Edward Tulane: All but the last chapter!!! We are so close. The homework this week is to read chapters 23-26 and fill out a reading analyzer over one chapter. They students are NOT to read the last chapter; we will do that together on Thursday. This week we reviewed the chapters we’ve read and broke into small groups to discuss settings and character traits. We learned about metaphors last week using the poem at the beginning of the book. As we talked about the different characters and settings we were able to see the connection between Edward’s heart breaking and being able finding a deeper love.

2^nd Grade MA

Prototypes: Monday and Tuesday we were busy creating and sharing car seat prototypes. Each group needed to share and explain their prototype drawing. Our job as a class was to give each group feedback on their prototypes. If we were concerned about strength, safety, or stability we brought it to their attention. The class was extremely polite while they helped critique each other’s design. The students were then given a chance to make any last minute adjustments.

3^rd Grade LA

Fables: This week we began our unit on fables. We discussed how fables have animal characters, the setting is usually outside, there is a hero/villain and of course a moral. I loved how the students applied some of the 7 habits to the fable’s main idea. Our first fable we read was "The Ant and the Grasshopper". We filled out a reading analyzer then discussed our answers. It was interesting to hear everyone's opinion of the main idea. Their insights of the moral were all slightly different. 

3^rd Grade MA

Chapter Check-up: At the beginning of the year I gave all the students a Unit Assessment. This ‘test’ was used to see what students knew about concepts we would be going over though out the year. Wednesday and Thursday were spent taking the Chapter Check-up. This test will show me how well the students understood the concepts we’ve learned so far. This weekend I graded the chapter checkups. I will compare these to the Unit Assessments, and hopefully get them back to you next week.

4^th Grade LA

Finishing up the time lines!! Make sure you child is collecting pictures for their time line. I can print them here but it is time consuming to open everyone’s folder to collect them and print.

4^th Grade MA

Chapter Check-up: At the beginning of the year I gave all the students a Unit Assessment. This ‘test’ was used to see what students  knew about concepts we would be going over though out the year. Wednesday and Thursday were spent taking the Chapter Check-up. This test will show me how well the students understood the concepts we’ve learned so far. This weekend I graded the chapter checkups. I will compare these to the Unit Assessments, and hopefully get them back to you next week.