December 6

News for December 6

This four-day week had the students do everything from appearing on our TV news to making snowballs out of paper plates!

This week we started each day with the star student giving the daily quiz, for which he/she wrote the questions. We will continue to do this until all children have had the chance to be in charge of the daily quiz.

The class practiced what they know about homophones and synonyms and played a class-wide game to review the concepts.

The students continued to collect socks for charity. Each day a group would count the number of socks collected and plan and rehearse their "ad" to remind the school about our sock-raiser on our TV news. At the end of the week the class had collected 111 pairs of socks!

In math, the class continued the unit on multiplication. They learned the strategies for multiplying by x 0 (the product is always zero),  x 1, x 2 (just like addition double facts) and x 5 (like skip-counting by 5's) and by  x 10 (the digits shift one place value to the left and the ones digit is always zero). Then they learned that if they eliminate the "easy" facts from the multiplication table, there are only 21 tricky facts to learn. The students then tried on their own to fill in his/her own multiplication table (up to the ten times table). To practice learning their multiplication facts, the students learned a multiplication game.

The students finished their Lego City and talked about how people in the city get out to the country. Then they drew these roads on their maps and created a legend on the map to show what the symbols mean.

The children finished their comics and created good copies. These were then cut and put into plastic sheet holders. The comics are now on display on the bulletin board in our hallway.

In math, the students used their circle folding skills to create approximate spheres using paper plates and bobby pins. This model creates a 14-faced geometric figure called a cubeoctohedron (14 faces, 24 edges and 12 vertices). These are now decorating the hallway outside of our classroom. They also used their knowledge of snowflakes being based on the shape of a hexagon, to create paper snowflakes.

At the end of the week, the students started an experiment to grow borax crystals (since it's too warm in the classroom to grow ice crystals!)

In computers, the children created virtual snowflakes at the site:

http://funny-games.biz/external/create-a-snowflake.html

Books read aloud this week:

The Art of the Snowflake by Kenneth Libbrecht
Tales of a Gambling Grandma by Dalyal Kaur Khalsa
Dear Deer - A Book of Homophones by Gene Barretta

Learning American Sign Language With Room 5 - Episode 13