BAILLY'S SUPER WORD OF THE WEEK
CARPE DIEM: seize the day
Change/Gifted Children/Best Practices
Duneland's high ability program will be changing starting with our current kindergarten students. Change is not always easy, but if it benefits our students then we know we are moving in the right direction! More details will soon follow . . .
1st GRADE LA
Finish to the start: We finished our persuasive paragraphs on Monday. I wanted the students to learn a few different concepts with this writing. First, I wanted the students to understand if you wish to persuade someone, you must give them reasons for following your thinking. In our paragraphs we gave three reasons we believed all first graders should speak Pig Latin. Next, I wanted to emphasize the idea of introduction and conclusion.
We want our readers to understand what we are writing about because they do not have the opportunity to read our writing prompt. By writing an introduction, it allows us to explain what we were prompted to write. In the conclusion, I wanted the class to recognize we are simply restating the introduction. Last, I wanted to stress basic writing skills.
The class now knows we indent at the beginning of paragraphs and we ALWAYS start a sentence with a capital letter and end with punctuation!!!
After our persuasive writing we went right into our next lesson, Connecting Letters and Language. Monday we did a fun activity changing one letter in a word to create a new word. However, the new word had to match the clue given to us. Tuesday we started class with the usual beginning of a lesson task, deciphering a message. We had 1 rock star who got it right away. The others soon followed once they found the clue and noticed the connection, OVER & UNDER. This lesson will show us how letters are kind of like magic; by simply changing one letter in a word we have something completely different.
2nd GRADE LA
Metaphors & Main Ideas: The class was introduced to metaphors last week.We began this week with a metaphor matching worksheet to reveal how common metaphors are and how often we hear them. Rereading chapter 4 in The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane the student now understand how the story Pellegrina told Abilene is a metaphor of Edward's life.
We also read a quote from the beginning of the book. Until now, the students would not have known how this exert would fit into Edward's journey. They clearly understands how this metaphor relates to Edwards life.
3rd GRADE LA
~NO CLASS DUE TO FIELD TRIPS AND HOLIDAY ACTIVITIES~
Nature interaction paragraphs AND pictures are still due!!
4th GRADE LA
Pictures, Timelines and Slideshows: As of Tuesday, everyone has had a chance to print all of their pictures for the timelines. Next, students will need to finish typing their dates, print and cut them out and glue the pictures and dates to their timelines.
We have ROCK STAR done with her timeline. These dates can always be typed at home on the student's school google account accessible from any computer with internet. I will allow the students to finish up any typing our first week back from break, then we need to put the timelines together and start on our slide show and monologue.
1st GRADE MA
What Happened: This week was game time. We played the game 'What Happened' where each table was split into 2 groups, the guessing group and the spinning group. The guessing group had to pull a card from our Grupo deck, recreate it with shapes we made with post-it's from a previous lesson and memorize it. The spinning group will spin the the game dish either landing on 'MOVE ONE SHAPE', 'DO NOTHING', OR 'TAKE OFF ONE SHAPE'.
With the guessing team's backs turned the spinning team alters the shape. The guessing team most then decide what component of the shape has been altered.
This game allows the students to use their spacial visualization in order to see how the shapes were manipulated.
2nd GRADE MA
NO CLASS THIS WEEK: I hope everyone enjoyed Roles Poetry Cafe and their holiday parties! I had a great time helping out with Mrs. Ahrendt's holiday party.
3rd GRADE MA
Chapter Check-Up: What a way to end the last week before Holiday break, with a Chapter Check-Up! I am so sorry, but I wanted to get it done rather than after break when we may have forgotten a few things.........
4th GRADE MA
Least Common Denominator: The last couple of weeks we've been comparing unlike fractions. We have learned a few different methods to find our answers. We learned a couple of generalization rules when we have common numerators and common denominators.
Our last day we were missing one of our classes and were unable to finish our least common denominator worksheet. We instead did a fun word/fraction worksheet.
The worksheet forced students to simplify, allowing the concept of our fraction strips we did at the beginning of the year to be used. The worksheet looked at a word to be the whole and letters to be part of the whole. It was a fun class.
