News for February 5

News for February 5

This week the children learned that February is a very busy month for holidays and traditions! There is Groundhog Day, Chinese New Year, Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Day), the 100th day of school, Valentine's Day, Family Day, Canadian Flag Day and Black History Month (plus a P. A. Day and Student Author Day).

In math, the students continued to review how to tell and show time on analog and digital clocks, this time to 5 minute intervals. We also learned about the relationships between units of time (for example, one day = 24 hours) and how to use a calendar to find dates given certain information (for example, What is the date three weeks before May 5th?)

In writing, the students learned about words that rhyme, both how to recognize words that rhyme and how to generate rhyming words. After hearing the read aloud book, "My Cat Likes to Hide in Boxes", the children used the pattern in the book to create their own versions of this rhyming poem. We then put all the poems together to create the class book, "Ms. R's Cat Likes to Hide in Boxes" using photos of my cat Iggy sitting, standing and sleeping in boxes.

The children also used their five senses to write riddle poems. After getting a slice of fresh orange, the students wrote down what the orange looked like, smelled like, felt like, sounded like and tasted like. This is a good introduction to simile and metaphor for the students are forced to compare the orange to other things (for example, "It looks like an orange smile" and "It tastes like sunshine").

The class finished their research books on simple machines. As a class the children learned about the history of the elevator. Did you know that at first people were scared to use an elevator as a people mover? Elisha Otis invented the "brake" that helps make the cable and pulley system safe. These little facts books were collected into a binder to create another class book. The students found out a lot about common objects and what kind of simple machine(s) they are. Did you know that the Louisville Slugger baseball bat is basically a lever and that it was invented by John A. "Bud" Hillerich around 1884, when he was only 17 years old?

In cursive writing, the students learned the lowercase cursive letters b, e, h, k and l. The class has now learned 21 of the 26 lowercase letters.

The class learned about the holiday and traditions of Chinese New Year. This holiday lasts 15 days from the first day of the lunar Chinese calendar. This year is called the year of the fire monkey. The children used "lai see" or lucky red envelopes and what they knew about the 3D geometric figure, the octahedron, to fold and staple together these fancy envelpes to create lantern decorations. These decorarations are now hanging in the hallway outside of our classroom. We also learned about the animals of the Chinese zodiac and figured out which animal each student birthday is linked to. It gets complicated because if the birthday is at the beginning of the calendar year, the Chinese zodiac animal is from the previous year. We will formally celebrate this holiday the week of February 15th.

In science, the class did a series of small experiments to learn about the force of static electricity. Using balloons, they created areas of static electricity by rubbing the balloons on their heads and trying to get the balloon to "stick" to their heads, hands or walls of the classroom. 

As a connection to our math unit on time, the children learned about the Spanish artist Salvador Dali's most famous painting, "The Persistence of Time" (1931) that features bent, floppy, melted analog clock images. They also saw photos of the artist, who is known for his fancy moustache. Dali was part of the surrealist art movement that took ordinary real things and made then look unreal or surreal. In the spirit of this painting, students collaged printed analog clocks to paper (upside down, cut up or with a Dali style moustache), then designed their own art using oil pastels. Later the students gave titles to their art and wrote a reflection on their artistic process. 

The class also had time to estimate and count the number of beads in a sealed bag of beads from the bead store. After counting out ten groups of 100 (1,000) and realizing how long it would take to count all the beads, I introduced the concept of using what they know about mass to help. So we used a digital scale to find out that 1,000 beads weighed 60 g and 100 beads weighed 6 g. Then we used this information to find out that there were 7,352 beads in the bag. A group of students was challenged to make a poster to show this information clearly (see photo in the next post). THEN, I showed a similar bag of beads to the students and asked how many beads they thought were in this bag...after some thought, they realized there would be about 7,000 beads because that was what they figured out from the other bag of beads. YAY! In this ad hoc project, the students showed applied math knowledge in various forms and their teacher was very proud of the class! 

Books read aloud this week:

Going Up! Elisha Otis's Trip to the Top by Monica Kulling

My Cat Likes to Hide in Boxes by Eve Sutton

Celebrating Chinese New Year by Diane Hoyt-Goldsmith

The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes