Week 14 (November 17 – 21)
WOW! How did Thanksgiving break come so fast?? Where has the
year gone? With the upcoming 2-day week, we plan to focus on our “Helping the
Homeless” service learning project. Although I know you are all excited about
the two day week, I know that you’re really curious about what we did this past week…
Math
We’ve begun working on place value, and I will say it seems
that most of the kids already have a strong understanding of place value. The
kids really like using the base 10 blocks and creating number with them. We’ve
also been working on our skip counting and number sense. Remember the chart we
made earlier in the year? Well we have made so much progress and the students
love watching their growth as the chart grows! Within math workshop we have
been working on multiple concepts. We’re using math games on the
Chromebooks to enhance fluency, we’ve had “surprise in a bag” to work on
number sense and counting, and also reviewing previous concepts through math
games such as Even Steven/Odd Todd and race to 100.
Matter
Working with matter has been so much fun and the kids have
been so engaged. We recently started working on mixing and separating matter,
but before that we talked about what matter means and how we can describe its
properties through the 5 senses. We engaged in an activity where the students
went to 5 different stations where they used their 5 senses to observe matter
and figure out what each matter was; needless to say some were easier than
others and some of the students’ reactions to some of the smells and tastes
were very interesting.
ELA
We finished up our last read aloud entitled Sadako and
the Thousand Paper Cranes. It was such a beautiful story that touched so
many of the students. It’s amazing what emotions and questions a book can stir
up inside of you. For our next read
aloud I chose two books and allowed the students to vote which one they wanted
to read. Once I tallied up the votes, I wrapped the winner up and allowed our
lovely classmate Stephany to do the reveal. Their reaction was PRICELESS, but How to
Steal a Dog won by a landslide.
We also had our ELA performance this Friday. Here is a link to the video in case you were not able to make it.
Helping
the Homeless
We’ve also been working on our “Help the Homeless” service
learning project. The students have engaged in some wonderful conversations and
ideas to help. We’ve contacted John Dawkins from Transitions to assist us with
our project. Mr. Dawkins revealed to us that the they are currently in need of
socks, coats, scarves, gloves, mittens, hand sanitizer, Kleenexes (small
packs), ChapStick, package of crackers, small candies, activity books, pens,
and crayons. The students are creating signs to display in the hallways of the
school to ask for support for our project. It’s amazing how much heart the
students are putting into this project. They genuinely care and want to help! I
can tell that this is going to be a great experience for all that are
involved!!
