News for January 15

News for January 15

This week the children continued the unit on poetry. We listened to and talked about nursery rhymes. The students were amazed that often all I had to do was read two or three words and they knew the rest of the poem. So much poetry is already inside them! The class wrote their own poems based on the nursery rhyme, "Little Jack Horner".

In math, the children continued the geometry unit by created 3D figures by folding and taping paper "nets". We hung the different prisms and pyramids on our class tree to create a "geome-tree". The students also made skeletons of geometric figures using toothpicks (edges) and pieces of plasticene (vertices) and wrote a list poem about one of their models. At the end of the week, both grades wrote a math test to end the unit.

The students finished the fiction stories based on the large paintings they created last week. These stories are now typed and on display in the hallway outside our classroom.

In science the students used lego in many different ways to investigate stability in structures. We talked about how, when designing a structure, one needs to make sure it is stable and that it serves a purpose. The students worked in pairs to create a structure out of a bin of lego. The groups created an animal hospital, a used vehicle store, a bank, a coffee shop, an auto parts factory, a bridge, a police station, a museum and a candy factory. The students then presented their designs to the class pointing out the features of the structure. Also, we looked at and talked about many different structural landmarks around the world. Some are so well constructed they have lasted hundreds, even thousands of years.

The class watched the DVD of Dr. Seuss' rhyming story, "Horton Hears a Who". After discussing the parts of the story, they wrote about what the problem was in the story and what Horton meant when he said, "a person is a person, no matter how small".