WORLD
SMILE DAY
Each year on the
first Friday in October, World Smile Day devotes a day to smiles and spreading
random acts of kindness.
There are many
benefits of smiling:
·
Improves mood
Who wouldn’t want all
those benefits? All it takes is smiling. And the more often, the better!
HOW TO OBSERVE #WorldSmileDay
On
World Smile Day, people around the world are encouraged to do an act of
kindness and make one person smile. Each year the Harvey Ball World Smile
Foundation holds special events on World Smile Day. The day is especially
popular in Worcester, MA, which is considered the birthplace of the yellow
smiley face.
·
Do a random act of kindness for
someone.
First Grade
Language Arts
This week in Language arts we began working on our connection shields. The kids will continue working on them this week and present them in class.
Generalizations of Connections:
Connections show relationships among objects, feelings, people and places.
Connections can be intellectual, physical, social or emotional.
Connections may change or stay the same overtime.
Math
This week we began the introductory unit. The students received a package from Imi and Zani who will be friends they will be corresponding with throughout the year. They were teaching us some general guidelines to be mathematicians in the classroom. Next week, we will continue with our introductory unit.
Second Grade
Language Arts
This week we looked at the structure we find in words. This activity introduced the students to the vocabulary map. As a group, we looked at the different sections on the map. This led us into a discussion on synonyms and antonyms. We also read the book The Most Magnificent Thing, a fictional book about a little girl who realized that making the most magnificent thing turned out to be harder than she realized. When I finished the story I asked the children,"How did the girl show perseverance"? They had many answers such as, keep going, don't give up, and continue were just a few.
Generalizations of a Structure:
A structure usually supports.
A structure can change over time.
A structure can be stable or unstable.
Math
We started off this week talking about our speaker and listener roles. I then introduced Dru and Teller, characters in their book, also known as the "Detective Duo," who wrote the kids a letter asking the class to help them gather ideas for a gallery full of geometric shapes for there new science museum. They were then shown two groups of shapes and they had to decide which group had only triangles. They decided pretty quickly that it was group B. We went on to use our speaker and listening roles and brainstormed ideas on what we know about triangles. They were great at coming up with all the attributes that make up a triangle. We then completed the Think Deeply letter to Dru and Teller.
Third Grade
Language Arts
The topic of interactions was continued this week. I also introduced the books How to Speak Cat and How to Speak Dog. We discussed human/animal interactions, along with the observable effect of the interaction, i.e. a girl pets a cat, and the cat purrs. We took the time to look at some important features of a nonfiction text such as the table of contents (with main sections separated by a blue dotted line), speech bubble summaries, headings, and index. They will not be reading the whole book. It's more of a narrow-in-on-the topic, than read for understanding. Once they were familiar with the features and layout, I showed them the preview chart that they would be filling out. Some of the kids were a bit confused on how to navigate the story. We will continue to work on this next week.
Math
This week we learned about repeating and growing patterns. They were presented with the pattern SARAHSARAHSAR and had to figure out what the 137th letter would be if Sarah continued writing her name. Some students were able to figure this out quickly while others struggled a bit. Next week we will continue to talk about this repeating pattern and the formula to solve it.
Fourth Grade
Language Arts
This week some of our students were gone on their field trip. For the students that were here we began working on writing out our interviews. We will continue working on the paragraphs next week and turning them into technology.
We started the lesson, The Shape of Things this week. I gave the kids all a parallelogram and asked them to write down everything they knew about it. When they were ready, I called on different kids to come up and write the characteristics of the shape on the board. They did a great job coming up with all the attributes of the parallelogram. Finally, they broke up into pairs and started working on a You either Have it......Or You Don't packet from their workbooks. They worked on identifying the defining characteristics of shapes, like polygons, quadrilaterals, and parallelograms. We will continue with this packet next week.
I hope everyone has a great weekend! Don't forget to smile:)
