Wednesday, May 6, is the 2nd annual Mighty Math Minds Tournament for Poudre School district elementary students. There are 15-5th graders joining me to create three teams that will compete. We will be meeting at 3:45 in the Werner parking lot to carpool over to the tournament. We should return to Werner at about 7:00pm. A pizza dinner will be provided. I cannot wait to report in next week's blog about what amazing problem solvers our Werner Wildcats are (cause I know they will represent us well!) If there was a theme this week, it was guest speaker. The first guest speaker we had was my author friend Tim Northburg. Mr. Northburg visited the 5th grade language arts students to talk about the process he has gone through to self publish his book Zebulon Quest: The Sword of Fire (available on Amazon now.) He also shared with the kids strategies and suggestions for editing and revising their writing to complete a quality product. I asked him to talk about this because elementary students have a tendency to jump right into writing without having a clear plan and then not wanting to re-read or re-work their product (it was perfect the first time, wasn't it?!) Mr. Northburg sharing how many rewrites he has been through with his book was an eye-opener for the students. Third grade language arts/creativity students had a chance to hear a guest speaker today too. Mrs. Unfug's father, Dr. John Hendrix, came to share with her reading group and mine. All of the kids had read The Green Book, which was a story about a group of people who leave Earth to try and colonize another planet. Part of their challenge in the book was to learn to grow seeds into edible crops on the new planet. Dr. Hendrix worked at CSU before his retirement from plant sciences. In the 70's, Dr. Hendrix worked on plant growing experiments that went into space. He shared with the kids the challenges of using growing techniques from our planet in a zero-gravity environment. The kids got to glimpse just how challenging it would be to try and bring the book we read to life and think about just some of the problems we have to solve if we truly want to head to Mars and beyond.
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It was a bit of a crazy week in my world this week with two days of substitutes so I could attend district trainings. I am thinking I should have had a substitute blogger this week to share what went on in my classroom! I'll do a quick update for math and language arts kids and let you get on with your weekend planning... Oh and by the way, the answers to last week's rebus puzzles was: Camera - c + can = American Ant + Ark + Sick - S + A = Antarctica Third grade math just completed our unit on long multiplication and division work. We are in the middle of another unit on measurement that covers the concept of volume and other measures of capacity and weight. We have one more unit on probability and that will get us through the end of the year. Fourth grade math just finished up a unit on fractions, decimals, and percents and the conversions necessary to switch between those three ways to represent numbers. The class did GREAT on our last test and you should see your child's copy in their Friday Folder (unless they decided to fix their mistakes.) This week we began a very short unit on symmetry and isometric geometry (think rotations, reflections, and translations of shapes.) We'll also throw in the concepts related to negative numbers (since that is the reflection of the number line.) Fifth grade math students are continuing to check on their stocks and make trades. We have about 2 more weeks of money making! We are finishing a unit cowering number concepts like negative number operations, order of operations, graphing inequalities, and basic algebra. The test for that will be on Tuesday. We'll wrap up the year with rate/ratio work and some probability fun. Language arts/creativity students are hard at work just like the math kids in my class. Here is a quick update on what we are up to... Third grade language arts/creativity kids are reading "Horton's Miraculous Mechanisms" for our literature circles and creating magazine monsters with descriptive paragraphs during our creativity time. There are some crazy creatures that were begun this week. Can't wait to see how they look when we wrap up this project next week. Fifth grade language arts students are reading "Tuck Everlasting" and having great discussions on whether living forever is a good thing or not. We have also begun the process of writing/adapting children's picture books into plays that we will perform the last week of school for kindergarteners. This week, the 5th grade language arts group presented their learning from our nonfiction reading and research unit. After interruptions in our work time due to PARCC and the musical, we finally had a chance to have our learning sharing time. Students were allowed to pic a research project of their choice, find a minimum of three resources, conduct interviews, and choose a presentation method (video, poster, speech, etc.) Topics ranged from space exploration to studying the chemistry of baking. Other students researched the life of famous people like Amelia Earhart. Two students research careers they are interested in like special education teacher or game board designer. The photo below shows our class playing the game that our future game designer created. It was a great chance to see some of the passions that these students have for learning when they are allowed to explore their own choices. Now that my language arts time is combined with students identified in creativity, I try to designate time in the week for exploration and learning related to both areas. For my third grade students, that means we spend our time on Thursdays learning about what it means to be creative and experimenting with our creative brains. Today we talked about part of being creative is being able to look at something common or usual but seeing it in a new way. To challenge our brains to think differently, we had fun with some rebus puzzles. Below are two examples that the students solved today. See if you can determine the phrase/word that is being portrayed through these puzzles (answers in next week's blog!) Fifth grade math students need to remember that Mighty Math Minds Tournament forms are due by Wednesday of next week. We'll be competing at Bethke Elementary on Wednesday, May 6. I would love to have your child join us for the fun (and the pizza!) Math class updates for you this week. First off, third grade math class is learning to complete long multiplication and long division problems in our latest unit. The students have been working with multiplying and dividing money (dealing with decimals in the process which is extra tricky.). They have been doing a great job of persevering and learning to apply their understanding of these concepts in tricky problems and situations. Give them a 2-digit number times a 2-digit number and make them show off their new skills! Fifth grade math students is working on a variety of lessons. First off, we have the Stock Market Game going strong. All of the groups are invested in stocks right now and anxious to check their progress each Tuesday. Last Friday, we had a guest speaker, Randy Petrelli from Goodwin Financial. He talked with the kids about investment strategies and how to minimize the risks inherent on Wall Street. Here are a couple of shots from his visit: This week, fifth grade also began to explore ratio and rates. The students all had problems from the real world where they had to determine the unit rate of a situation (price per pound of bananas, heartbeats per minute of a blue whale, miles per gallon in a car, and many more scenarios.) Each small group was asked to create a rate chart and translate that data onto a graph, as well as create an algebra problem that related to their findings. Great application of learning to see how math is actually useful beyond Werner's doors! A couple more pictures are here and even more are on the photo page of the website. Last but not least, fourth grade math students are working with converting from fractions to decimals and to percent and looking at where in life do we really need to be able to perform these functions. We looked at a children's statistics picture book that shared data if the world were proportionally shrunk to 100 people what would be those 100 people's nationalities, languages, religions, and many more interesting data sets. We left off the week in the middle of our work showing that data in fractions, decimals and percent's. We'll finish that work and share our findings next week. Below are a few pictures of students working and the video we watched with some more fascinating information about the people in our world. I overheard one student, after we watched this video, say to his partner, "Watching a video like that makes you grateful!" I have to agree - check it out for yourself... Quick reminder that April is Parent/Teacher conference month. If you desire to have a conference with me about your child's work in my class, I am happy to set up a time to chat. I am available almost any morning before school except Tuesdays (due to staff meeting commitments.) I am so excited to see 5th grade's musical performances next week. I know they are busy with preparing for wax museum and gearing up for Eco Week. I have two more opportunities for students who are interested and have time to commit to one more thing. 1. I will be doing a session of Little Kids Rock on Fridays for ten interested fifth graders at lunch in April and May. Students will be provided a guitar and taught the basics of chord progression and contemporary music. The kids can bring their lunch to my room, eat, and then have some fun jamming! Sign up sheets are coming home in Friday folders. (FYI... this is open to all 5th grade students and there will be a lottery if there are more than 10 students interested due to instrument and space constraints.) 2. PSD is holding the second annual Mighty Math Minds Tournament at Bethke Elementary. I can take three teams of 5 students each. Your 5th grade math student should have brought home the sign-up sheet today. The only commitment is being available Wednesday, May 6, from 4-8. Dinner will be provided, and the event is free. I will be needing parent volunteers to drive though. Check your calendars to see if your student is available to join us for a night of fun competition. Click on the flyers below for more details: It has been great to have a whole week of teaching with no major testing going on. This has allowed me to get my third grade language arts/creativity group rolling. We have been discussing how we will conduct our literature circles this quarter and the jobs each child will have to help facilitate our novel discussions. The kids got their first book for the quarter, Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms, and also got their first job assignment (either director, summarizer, word wizard, illustrator, or vacation.) Our first meeting is on Tuesday so make sure to check with your third grader to see if they need to read over the weekend to prepare. Since some of the kids are identified as creatively gifted, we try to take one day a week to talk about what it means to be creative and do lessons/projects that enhance their skills. Today we did a short but fun drawing. The students had a paper with what looks like a 2-year-old squiggle. They had to use their minds-eye to turn it into something that was more than just a scribble and make sure it was detailed and titled. I've included their pictures below since they were so fun! We had a beach scene with a squiggle wave, a skydiving scene with a squiggle rope, a whale king with a squiggle body, and more.... |
Tracey BeanWerner Elementary Archives
May 2018
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