Ms. Tinsley's Classroom Blog : August 29

Week 3-4: August 29 – September 9

We’ve had another good week! Here’s a small glimpse of what we’ve been working on!

Exploration Time

During the early morning at in the afternoon (during dismissal) students are allowed to explore and engage in different activities that interest them. Lately the kids have been working on assembling jigsaw puzzles, creating new games with the tennis balls, and playing some fun car games. I’m hoping that soon I will be able to get to know them a little better in order to find out what their interests are and then I’ll be able to get more materials in order to supply the opportunities they want to explore and find their interests and likes.

Math

WOW! I’m so surprised and proud of our kidos. They’ve really been working hard on understanding and solving word problems. We’ve slowly been working on understanding what multiplication means. How it’s a simpler way to solve a repeated addition problem. That when doing multiplication our goal is to find the total number in all. I love that the kids are learning and using multiple strategies to solve the different problems; from drawing pictures and arrays to using finger tricks. I’m excited to build upon what we’ve already learned and to see where it takes us!

Author’s Cycle

Over the past two weeks, we’ve been working to understand the author’s cycle and what good authors do in order to publish our own stories and books as authors. The kids have learned the steps to the author’s cycle and that some steps have to be repeated multiple times before they can move on to the next step. This can be extremely frustrating for the kids, but I think it helps them to understand the stress and hard work that goes into all of the books that they love to read! We will continue to push through our first go round of the author’s cycle and hopefully we will be publishing our first stories soon!

Getting to Know South Carolina

In our IB unit “Who Are We”, we’ve been getting to know each other and ourselves. Within this unit we have also been getting to “who we are as a state”! It excites me to see how excited the kids get about learning about their state. They really do enjoy learning about the different regions; what they look like, what they feel like, and what cities and animals are located there. We will continue to dive a deeper and deeper into getting to know our state in its physical sense and its history.