The positive student behavior, work, and attitudes have filled another ginormous Reese's Mug! And this is how our class celebrated with a fraction model to show the choices!
Emily and Benja who are Teacher's Assistants this week did the tally work. Each student got to choose between one salty Cheez It or one sweet Sour Patch chewy. As the kids chose, the TAs colored in the fraction. That way what was chosen was represented in the fractional model.
The reason there was a choice between salty or sweet is that, at two different Morning Meetings, motions have been made for what will be the reward for all the good stuff the kids are doing. Yet, there hasn't been a unanimous choice even with all the good discussion. So today, I thought it would be fun to do an experiment and see which direction the class would go and made a hypothesis that it would be about 1/2 and 1/2 from the discussions. And look-- completely different outcome!
So Excited-- Front Row Seats for Collision of Rhythm Performance at the Gladish Community Center
The kids were a terrific audience for these amazing performers. It was fun to have so many family members be able to come too!
Check out the link to see a look at them. They perform tonight!
Thanks to Festival Dance and its sponsors for providing this opportunity to students in our county. It was the first 'live' performance for most of the students!
Applying the Idea of Fractions
Today during Math, I had the kids take fractions and make the strips that show what they look like from 1 whole to 1/12 of the whole. They used a ruler, scissors, colored pencils, and a black and white template that I gave them. (That is the one you will see at home and we folded them accordion style.)
The colorful ones, even in the ROYGBIV pattern, we kept at school to use during this topic we are working on.
The kids worked by (MP.6) attending to precision to get the parts equally sized.
You can see Ely, Clover, and Loki are at different parts of the lesson. The kids behind them, Spencer, Heidi, and Langston are all very focused too.
LIFESIZE read by Eliza
We had an Usborne bookfair last week and Eliza donated a book to our class. She picked a great book! This book by Sophy Henn shows the actual size of animals or their parts.
She was walking around in this picture showing the kids and getting them to flap at the speed of a hummingbird. She showed the toenails of an elephant--only 2 could fit on the page!
It is always neat to see the kids share ideas with each other.
Charades!
We have the rules down for this fun nonverbal game. We have played it several times and this time, I broke the kids into groups of 4. You can see three of the 5 groups here. They love it! They are getting better and better at coming up with ways to express the ideas and rhyming (sounds like...) to get their audience to guess the word or phrase. Learning to communicate in many forms is a skill that can help so much. :)
Halloween Costumes and Benja's Birthday!
There was a big assortment of characters! This group of cats, a dog, video game characters, vampires, military soldiers, queen, pirate, panda, jester, bat, Coroline cast members, football players, and others did a creative job with their costumes!
We talked about how much has changed in a year from not being able to Trick or Treat last year to everyone getting out. We all feel really lucky!
Partner Math Conversations with "Smart Boards"
Using 2 short videos to talk about the Math Practice Standards, the kids worked on the definition of Reason and Argument. We looked at the word origin for each and its meaning.
The kids did a very good job talking with each other and explaining their thinking. Math is a tool for communication and they got lots of practice.
3 Kids doing the Experiment to see How Rain Affects Soil.
Each group gets a 1/2 hour to cooperatively work through the procedures. They make predictions and do an analysis of the results once completed. During the experiment, they made observations and recorded the facts. It is a very good process. And, believe it or not-- the total time is 3 and 1/2 hours to get all of them to be able to experience this!
Terrific Update! 39 lbs dropped off this morning and the tally that we are over TWO TONS of plastic material for this school year!
These two students, Karissa and Heidi, had the job this week of collecting and weighing what comes into our 9 boxes here at school. And, the large white bag was dropped at my house! 😊Thank you!
We prepped for days by reading, talking, watching relevant videos, and making graphic organizers to capture all the notes for our field trip to the Appaloosa Horse Museum.
This picture is when the kids are learning about the traits of an appaloosa horse. This field trip is to see the importance of the horse to the Nez Perce Tribe and understand the life of indigenous people.
It was so fun to have so many family members attend with us and all three of the student from UI!
