Another way to show our love of Geometry, aside from our final geometry project, was to make flipbooks! The students were given the directions of including 4 translations, 4 rotations, and 4 reflections with no other requirements. Some students had fun getting creative with shapes moving around the page, while others chose to move objects around the page. This project was a great way for the students to show what they had learned and embracing their creative sides!
The students also submitted their final geometry projects this week which fashioned pictures of symmetry and shapes in their lives with the added bonus of finding the surface area and volume of some of those rectangular prisms. We got to get very creative with our geometry sides. Looking forward we will be moving on to Statistics and Probability. This week we celebrated Dr. Seuss' birthday by dressing up and reading a lot. Each day we had a quote of the day to remind us of Dr. Seuss' teachings. We spent our Thursday morning, the anniversary of Dr. Seuss' birthday, reading with our buddy class. Students had the opportunity to read to their buddy as well as be read to by their buddy. Students also read silently while sitting with their buddy. It was a very fun celebration of reading and Dr. Seuss.
A new strategy to help all students and meet all student's needs, we have started two new lunch bunch groups. Every Monday we are beginning Math Challenge Monday. All students who want to tackle Geometry Proofs have been invited to join the Monday lunch bunch. As the current topic is geometry, the students are working on proving and disproving current proofs. On Wednesdays, students who are struggling have been invited to come to get extra help from volunteer students who want to support their classmates. The students were paired off and worked together to help complete extra practice problems and talk through their math reasoning. All students are encouraged to speak to me, Ms. Wachs prior to attending either session. In order to celebrate Kindness Week, we decorated our door to show our steps toward kindness. We also spent time thinking about acts of kindness we could each do as individuals and added them to the school's tree of kindness leaves. After thinking about kindness in many ways, the students were given the task of passing around kindness to their classmates through kindness-grams. Each "gram" had a small act of kindness to complete. Once you receive one you needed to pass the act of kindness on to another student. We hope that the acts of kindness will continue to spread past this special week.
We had such an amazing time learning the science of snow tubing. We were able to complete some short experiences with speed and distance before enjoying the freedom of snow tubing all afternoon. In science class the students will continue to have the opportunity to calculate data and plot the information, crossing over into our math curriculum of graphing, analyzing, and calculating a set of data points. We will continue to use what we learned on the mountain as we progress in our math curriculum! Thank you to all the parent volunteers for making this trip possible. Over the past few weeks we have been working on continuing to practice old skills through math games. Something I find very important is learning that math isn't always algorithms and paper practice. We have embraced that in the classroom through different types of math games like memory, connect four, bingo and more.
Connected to the Science curriculum, we were able to walk around the trash to steam plant to learn about energy and conservation. The students got a tour of the facilities from the trash drop off to the steam towers. The students also got the chance to sit in the conference room to learn more about what trash to steam means and how it is embraced globally.
As you might have seen in a parent letter, "while particularly effective as a remedial or intervention program for struggling students, Think Through Math’s adaptive learning technology addresses the learning needs of ALL students, including students working at grade level, English Language Learners (ELL), those with advanced math aptitude, and students with learning disabilities." We have been using Think Through Math once as week as well as at home for extra practice. This has been supplimenting our math workshop and differentiated instruction.
We got to spend the week working with our buddies to create a beautiful fingerpainted sky line that was sold at the Auction. While the students were not painting they were reading, drawing and learning with their buddies. The students learned about Apollo 13 and how the crew handled the situation.
Even with a short week, we were able to accomplish so much! From meeting our buddy class, going on a tour of the Penn Museum, and creating a school wide peace sign there were smiles all day. The students were paired up with the students of Mr. Ferrante's second grade class. The students helped their buddies create pinwheels for peace. The project allowed the students to both discuss what a hero in the school is and practice helping others to follow step-by-step directions to create a pinwheel. When all was completed the students united with the whole school to make a peace sign and then place their pinwheels around the property. On top of our buddy project, the students also were able to visit the Penn Museum and learn about Mummies and Ancient Egypt. Feel free to ask your child about their Free 1 year membership to the museum!
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June 2018
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