Week 4

Hi!  We had a great week again this week.  Thanks for helping your students complete their homework packets!  We had a great return rate, and that extra practice is very important!!!

Student with science experiment. (You can't see it well, but it's a balloon with a skewer through it.)

Student holding pennies and hundreds chart.  We used these to begin learning how to count money this week.

Science: inside a pencil

Student dissecting a pencil

Students dissecting pencils

 Art project (building a bug capturing box) pictures:

free time project

Funny Sayings from Kids: In science we’ve been learning the word hypothesis, which basically means a prediction for an experiment.  We were writing questions and hypotheses about how pencils were made one student’s question was, “How can I make a pencil?”  His hypothesis was, “If I find a colored tree, I can make a colored pencil.”

Suddenly during a math discussion, students wanted to talk about leprechauns and how they’ve seen them and almost caught them. . .It was difficult to redirect the kids back to math, but I also it just made me laugh since it is only September!

My wife, Mrs. Smith, came in to teach an art lesson.  (She had our four month old son named Charlie with her as well.)  I said, “Look who is here to help us with art!”  In unison, the class said “Charlie!”

Special Activities: We had some parent volunteers help with reading this week.  We also had an art lesson from my wife where students got to make bug catchers.

Academics: This week in math we reviewed writing numbers, and we talked a lot about how to find out what number is in between two numbers.  We also did math facts, learned the word half, and learned how to count pennies. In writing, we continued our talk about how a sentence frames our thoughts, along with how to make a complete sentence.  To practice this, we have been writing and editing a parent letter regarding an upcoming social studies activity.  It will be sent home when we finish editing it as a class in the next week or two.  Our reading and spelling focus was beginning c and k words, where we learned that “i” follows “k” and “a” follows “i” (cap, kit, etc.).  In social studies, we introduced the constitution on a first grade level.  (Monday was constitution day.)  Students really enjoyed science this week, as always.  The first day of science we began to think like scientists by solving an interesting problem.  I pretended that I was going to be in a talent show, and I wanted to do a magic trick of poking a sharp wooden skewer through a blown up balloon.  Then the students began to make hypotheses followed by whole-class experiments regarding how we could make it work.  The second day, we dissected a pencil and watched a video about how pencils are made.  Here is the link to that video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwYTibTbYHQ