We have had such a busy couple of weeks and are learning so much. This week, Mrs. Maggart was sure to keep her camera with her to document all of our exciting learning adventures. And guess what? We even got to get behind the camera this week, in the name of Science!
Each Monday, we start our morning by setting weekly goals for each subject area in our Leadership Journals. Mrs. Maggart also has learning goals for our class each week. She has started displaying them on our front board so we know what our goal is and what we should be learning in each subject.
Last week, we finished working through the Writing Process and learning all of the writing vocabulary writers use: revise, edit, conference, and publish. We finished publishing our first books!
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| Conferencing |
We focused on poems this week in our Reading and Writing workshops. We started a collection of poems: poems that were silly, poems that were fiction and non-fiction, poems that were long, poems that were short, poems that rhymed, and poems with alliteration. We used a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast the stories we have been reading and modeling our writing after with the work of the poets. There were many different things that we saw were different about the two genres of writing as well as features that were the same.
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| We worked in our table groups to complete the Venn Diagram ourselves. Look at our synergy! |
We really enjoyed reading and looking with our writers' eyes for rhyming words in poems and alliteration in poems. We even tried to write our own poems using our mentor poets' work as inspiration. Now, we are able to add "Poems" to our list of genres, or types of writing we can do, during our Writer's Workshop.
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| Synergizing to discover how stories and poems are similar and different so we can complete our Venn Diagram |
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| Some of the rhyming words we heard in our poems |
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| Our definition of "Alliteration" |
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| Writing our OWN poems to add to our collection of poems in our special notebooks |
In Math, we are working hard on daily problem solving focusing on addition. We call this time "Question of the Day." We also work with Mrs. Maggart in our math groups and we are all learning different strategies and math games to help us master our number sense and addition skills. We read a book for mathematicians and picked out all of the math words we heard.
Then, we leaned how to use a vocabulary map to define and learn about new words. Look at our vocabulary maps we completed using the different math words that we learned.
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| The math words we found |
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| The Vocabulary Map we did as a class |
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| The Vocabulary Maps we did in our table groups |
For the past 2 weeks we have begun doing "Math Attack" in the afternoons. This is a time when we work with a buddy for the week to put our heads together and tackle a variation of math problems that focus on past skills and objectives that we have already learned in class like place value, building numbers, identifying odd and even numbers, and other objectives and skills. And guess what? These "Math Attack" activities come from...second grade! Think how ready we're going to be next year! And we are really impressing Mrs. Maggart with how hard we are working at being mathematicians, double-checking our work, using our math tools and strategies, and even challenging ourselves!
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| Two heads are better than one! |
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| Using different tools and using different strategies |
In Science, we learned about three forms of energy: heat, light, and sound. We explored a lot of different items and determined what kind of energy they use or produce.
We started off by exploring with light energy by figuring out how to make our flashlights work and then exploring what this type of energy could do. We could bend it, block it, and make it move and travel!
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| It works! |
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| Check it out! |
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| Fun with light energy! |
On our technology day, we used the laptops and learned how to use Microsoft Word to type, add clip art, and print a piece about our favorite toy and what type(s) of energy we think they use or produce.
We had a field day exploring different items Mrs. Maggart brought! We explored a blow dryer, an iron, a toy car, alarm clocks, and even a camera.
When it came to exploring Mrs. Maggart's camera, she let us take over with it. It was only today when she went to post our blog that she got to see all of the pictures we took! Check out OUR picture taking skills!
We're a pretty great group of kids! :-)
Love,
