First Grade
Language Arts
Students presented their Connection Shields on Monday this week. It was great to see that the kids were able to come up with drawings that showed connections to the things and people that matter to them. They were very excited to present them in class. I hung their shields in the classroom for now, but will send them home shortly. Thank you parents for your help on this project!
The students were then introduced to Caesar's Cipher Wheel. I explained the history behind the Cipher and how Julius Caesar used it to keep messages safe from falling into enemy hands. The kids were excited about using the cipher but still need some practice learning how to decipher messages. We will continue to use them next week.
Math
In math this week we talked about using weight as a form of measurement. I read Just a Little Bit to the students to help them understand the concept of weight. They also held objects in their hands and modeled being a scale to show if the one object was heavier than,lighter than or about the same as the object in the other hand.
Second Grade
Language Arts
This week we worked on sentence structure. The students learned that the subject tells the reader who or what a sentence is about while the predicate tells readers what is happening in the sentence. After breaking sentences into subject/predicate we went through and identified the nouns,verbs and adjectives in the sentences as well. The kids really seemed to enjoy doing this!
Next week we will begin working on the structure of a paragraph using the Hamburger model.
We also read the non-fictional text Marvelous Mattie. This is another great story of perseverance that continued our lesson from last week. I was very impressed at how attentive the students were during the reading and how well the understood and interpreted the text. This week we finished up our math definitions that we will be using throughout the year. We began talking about symmetry which will be the focus of our next lesson. We were not able to meet for math on Thursday this week due to the second grade field trip.
Third Grade
Language Arts
This week we continued our studies on inferred behaviors using the How to Speak Cat and How to Speak dog. The students have been struggling a little bit with this activity. They learned the features of a non-fiction text to help them find the information they were looking for without reading the entire book. We will finish up this activity next week.
Math
This week we continued working on repeating patterns using names of different lengths to find differences between words that contained some of the same letters but occurred at different frequency in the pattern.We will spend a little more time on this next week to ensure that everyone is truly understanding how to use a function to figure out repeating patterns before we move on.
Example:
SARAHSARAHSARAHSARAHSARAH..... what would the 137th letter be if Sarah wrote her name 50 times??
Fourth Grade
Language Arts
We continued working on our Change interviews. Students peer edited each others paragraphs and then I edited the papers and had them write a final draft if they were ready. Next week we will turn these into technology and finish them up.
Math
This week we continued defining our shapes. The students worked on noting characteristics of polygons, parallelograms, trapezoids, squares, rectangles and rhombi. We discussed that though all squares are parallelograms, not all squares are rectangle.This applies to other shapes and groups as well. We will continue working on shapes next week.
