Holiday break has arrived! I hope you have a fabulous time enjoying your family and friends and hopefully some relaxing. For the last post of 2016, I will provide you with the videos from our second engineering challenge. Third graders will be showing you how to build an effective parachute for astronaut safety. Fourth graders will display how to create shock-absorbing systems for moon landers. And finally fifth graders will be demonstrating robotic arms that might be useful for remote exploration of distant planets. All pictures are also on the Photos page of the website if you click here. Enjoy!
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I hope you all have plans to stay warm this weekend. Hopefully you have your Christmas preparation mostly done so you don't have to brave the cold to do too much shopping! Here is a little reading and YouTube-watching to give you something to do while you snuggle up on the couch. I wrote a blog article a couple of weeks ago about the different mutliplication strategies that you may see your child (especially if they are in 4th grade) trying with our new curriculum. I thought I would give you a glimpse at what long division strategies look like too. Fourth grade just completed their unit on division, and they did great! Fifth grade will be doing a review unit after break to see what they rememer about long division and also reviewing division when deicmals are involved. Please let me know if you have any question. I have also included a quick video that I shared with 4th grade families that will explain how the Partial Quotients method works. Ultimately, we still want kids to know how to do the standard, traditional algorithm that you and I learned in school, but sometimes in order to understand why that works, it helps to have a method that is more conceptual and based on better number sense ideas. Today was our second Engineering Challenge of the year. 3rd graders were building parachutes to save the astronauts. 4th graders were landing their astronauts on the moon. 5th graders were building robotic arms for space rovers to explore distant planets. A HUGE thank you to all of the parents that were able to come and help and join in on the fun. To add to the fun, 4th and 5th graders wanted to participate in the latest social-media craze by filming their own Mannequin Challenge. I'll have the videos of their actual work up by next week. In the meantime, enjoy this freeze frame of our work today.
And here is one last attempt to help you with your Christmas shopping. This time I am hoping you are planning to buy a couple of books for your child to read in the new year. Here are some of my favorite young adult fiction. (You might even enjoy reading some of these yourself!) Also below is a document that I helped created a few years ago to suggest higher-level series that are great ideas for gifted students needing to get hooked back into reading. What an exciting couple of weeks we are having, especially in math classes. Here are a few of our special events that we have completed or are coming up:
Language Arts students in 3rd grade are now in the middle of their first literature circle during their time with me. At various points in the year, all of my language arts groups doing literature circles and they look simliar in all grade levels (of course, with different levels of books!) Let me give you a quick run-down of how they work... On Thursdays (almost always,) students must show up to class with their required reading done. This is usually about 5 chapters from their current book. Each child is also required to show up with their literature notebook and job card. In that literature notebook, they must have their job for the week done. These are the possible jobs they may have to do during a week:
Finally, in case you are looking for a few ideas for Christmas, here are some of the kids favorite games/toys in my classroom that you might consider.
Please check your calendars to see if you might be available to sign-up for helping with our next STEM Engineering Challenges in our regularly scheduled math classes on Thursday, December 15, and Friday, December 16. Plus if you volunteer you will get to witness the fun we'll be having first hand. 3rd grade @ 1:30-2:30pm 4th grade @ 8:55-9:55am 5th grade @ 10:30-11:30am This week's blog focus will be on third graders. First off, third grade language arts students have resumed their studies with me for the month of December. To kick off our week together, they all presented their book projects from our last novel study on The Green Book, a story about a group that leaves earth to establish a new colony on a distant planet called Shine. Below are some pictures of their work. Some students dediced to create an invention that the people of Shine could use while some students chose to make a mind map of Shine, document the lifecycle of the moth people, or fill in a Venn diagram of the similarities/differences between Shine and Earth. After closing up our study of The Green Book, we have been learning how to participate in literature circles this week and will begin reading short novels this week and the students will be leading and participating in their small-group discussions. Third grade math students are finishing up the last multiplication and division unit of the year. They have done a great job beginning to learn and master their basic facts. But one of the most important skills in math is understanding when in life you will need to use the various operations. This week we spent considerable time not only solving problems but also creating problems so they could continue to explore those areas of life where combining equal groups or dividing equal groups is necessary. The pictures below show our activites where they had to write a real-world story problem requiring either mutliplication or division. Then they had to solve each other's problems, and final check each other's work. Much more fun than Mrs. Bean making all the problems and checking their work! Finally this week, I would like to share some pictures I took Friday of my small 2nd grade group. Since I am only part-time, my schedule is limited to work with the primary grades. But on Fridays I do have half an hour where I can challenge some of the 2nd grade students who have presented a need for more problem solving and logic. In the pictures here, these gentlemen are solving "Logic Links" - using the clue provided, they have to place the right color of chips in the right order. They were AMAZING! In our half hour, most of them solved at least 10 different puzzles!
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May 2018
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