On Tuesday the class read the book Martin's Big Words about Martin Luther King Jr. and saw the slideshow below showing all 44 US Presidents before watching the inauguration on TV with the rest of the Annex:
In math we worked with the inequality sign < and pretended it was a mouth trying to eat the bigger number. I try to reinforce on the concept that the mouth wants the larger number and focus on the term "greater than" before moving on to read the inequality from left to right using either "greater than" or "less than." For example, we are reading 3 < 4 as "4 is greater than 3" right now, but eventually students should be able to read it as "3 is less than 4." It was interesting to observe that students saw the equal sign = as only being used to point to the answer in an equation (e.g. 5 + 6 = 11) and not as meaning "the same as," so we reviewed that it can also be used without any addition/subtraction (as in 45 = 45). This week we also reviewed the values of base-10 blocks as representing two-digit and three-digit numbers, using the terms "ones place," "tens place," and "hundreds place."On Thursday we got to hear the local Beauty and the Beast Storytellers tell three tales. One was about a giant pumpkin with great sound effects provided by the audience, another was about a ghost catcher who outsmarted the ghosts, and the third was about a forgetful boy who repeated whatever someone told him. Ask your child to fill in the details for you!
On Friday morning we had a visit from the Museum of the Earth public program coodinator, Samantha Sands, to talk about our field trip on March 9. We also had a brief video chat with our partner class at Northeast Elementary School using Skype! On Friday afternoon we learned about momentum by making foam race tracks for marbles. The lesson was based around the concept that if the marble had a longer, steeper slope to roll down it would be going faster - eventually fast enough to not fall out of a loop or twist in the track. Look for pictures of those experiments to be posted here soon....
A reading strategy we are starting to use is to think about spelling patterns (e.g. "ce" usually sounds like "s") and to try both sounds a vowel can make when sounding out unknown words. We examined the spelling pattern "ee" and "ea" that usually sounds like long e, and made a list of such words for reference when we are reading and writing. We also reviewed the two sounds vowels can make and how a silent e at the end of a word can signal the long sound (aka letter name).
Ask your child if he/she can name the pictures we are using to represent each vowel sound:
long a: acorn long e: eagle long o: OK sign
short a: apple short e: egg short o: octopus
long i: eyeball long u: unicorn
short i: itchy short u: umbrella
Finally, we are almost finished reading aloud the third book by local author Ruth Stiles Gannett, The Dragons of Blueland. Next week we will begin another classic, Mr. Popper's Penguins.
0 comments:
Post a Comment