Celebrating Authors!

In writing, students have been working hard to publish their first book of the year! They have focused on starting sentences with a capital letter, using end punctuation and proper letter formation. Once the books were complete, we celebrated with an Author's Chair. Everyone had a chance to sit on our special chair, read their story to the class and then sign their name on the chair. After reading their story, classmates gave them compliments and suggestions....ways to make their story even better. We will continue book writing this week, incorporating these ideas into our new writing pieces. 

Hands On Nature

Last week we explored worms and dirt with our Hands On Nature volunteers. We learned that worms are decomposers that help make soil. Students identified the parts of a worm and even got to see some up close under a microscope.

Later, we went outside to find worms in the gardens and got messy creating mud paintings!

Fifth Grade Friends

We paired up with our 5th grade buddies and walked to the end of School Street to begin our hike.  As the partners walked together, they tried to find out 5 new things about each other.

Once we got on the trail we started a nature scavenger hunt.

Then it was time to run across the field to enter the woods.

After many interesting findings, we crossed back over the field and went into a completely different type of forest.

Everyone had fun running in this forest (and all of the pictures of this are blurry!).

It was heartwarming to watch the students interacting.  The younger students brought out the best in their older partners.  The 5th grade students were attentive, caring and helpful.  The 1st grade students enjoyed the attention and friendship of an older child.  And, the 1st grade students brought out a playful side of their partners.

Finally we had a challenging hill to climb and then we returned to school.

We wrote about our experiences.

And, then we published this writing with an app called Book Creator.

Mystery Rocks

How do scientists observe?  We had used our eyes to carefully describe rocks that we found at school last week.  This time we used touch to describe mystery rocks that we couldn't see. We used words to describe the texture and shape of the rocks.  Then we drew what we thought the rocks looked like.  Finally we got to take them out of the bag.  The rocks were both pieces of shale found near Lake Champlain.  One of the rocks felt smooth and the other rock felt rough.  Why were they different if they were the same type of rock? Now we made hypotheses like scientists do.  Perhaps one rock got pushed by water.  Maybe one rock got scratched by sand.  

"Let's Talk Math"

We post a "core math idea" for the students to know our focus in math.  Explaining a core math idea is part of our "best practices" for math instruction that all teachers are using in our school district.

In addition, as part of the best practices methods, the children are learning how to use "habits of mind" and "habits of interaction" in math and other subjects too.  We will highlight a few of these here.

Two habits of mind the children worked on in this math lesson were:
to "make sense" of a problem
to "justify" or prove their thinking.

And, the habits of interaction they used were:
private reasoning time
explain my thinking
listen to understand

The children practiced all of these skills playing a domino game.  Each child chose a domino and had private think time to figure out how many dots were on the domino.  Then one child asked his/her partner, "What is your number and how do you know?"  The first child listened to understand his/her partner's thinking and then had the chance to explain his/her thinking.  They worked together to figure out which domino had more dots.  Then the player with the higher number won the 2 dominoes (a game you can also play at home).  All of this talk was to help the children verbalize and thus internalize addition strategies.

Wooly Bear Caterpillar

We had some fuzzy, little guests in class this week. We did a little research together and learned some interesting facts about this commonly seen caterpillar.

The Wooly Bear Caterpillar emerges from an egg in the fall. (That is why we seem to find them everywhere right now.) Then, it literally freezes solid through the winter. It thaws out in spring and emerges to pupate. It then transforms into an Isabella Tiger Moth and has only days to find a mate!

Writing, writing, writing!!

We have been writing up a storm this week!  The focus of our writing has been all about feelings. After a read aloud such as The Very Cranky Bear or Wemberly Worried, we thought about times when we feel worried, cranky, happy or mad. The our writers got busy putting their thoughts on paper.

We also had fun creating an imaginary scene using our favorite crayon color....inspired by Harold and the Purple Crayon!

Dominoes are an excellent way to practice math facts! in class this week we learned how to play the classic game. In the coming days, we will be using dominoes to learn some simple addition strategies.