Apologies for the long time between posting. Things have been busy at home and at school. As we start our first International Baccalaureate unit we are learning about fall-time traditions such as Halloween traditions. We read an informative text called Celebrate Halloween. We discussed how one Halloween tradition was to dress up in costumes. Students wrote stories about their favorite costumes. The sample writing below says “I like the unicorn”.
For math we created a class bar graph to show what kind of costume is our favorite costume. Students put a sticky note above the category of the costume that they will wear during Halloween, or their favorite costume. We discussed the category with the greatest number of students and the category with the least amount of students.
For art we did two projects; Frankenstein paper plates and Frankenstein puzzles.
Thursday as part of our family unit we read the book My Wild Sister and Me, and we talked about how the boy and his sister liked to dress up and pretend to be animals. Then we discussed about what we like to do with our family and then illustrated pictures about it. I dictated what they said verbally in their stories.
For math we made a class graph that illustrated who had only brothers, only sisters, both brothers and sisters, or no brothers or sisters in their family. We compared the numbers and discussed which category had the most and which category has the least. These activities and more can be found here.
Finally as a treat we had one of our students parents come in to the class to read a book about a special family.
Sorry everyone that there has been a lack of updates, my student teacher had been taking over the responsibilities for much of the winter / early spring.
This week we’ve had our unit on beach and ocean animals. We started off the week by reading an emergent reader book called At the Beach. We labeled a web thinking map that identified the main idea and details of the story.
For writing students used the ideas from the web thinking map, as well ideas of their own, and wrote about what they would like to do at the beach.
For math students took various 2 dimensional shapes and created their own sandcastles. They then graphed the number of each shapes they used for their sandcastles.
Today we read the book Curious George Goes to Costume Party by Margaret & H.A. Rey. Students then wrote about what they wanted to be for Halloween. As a class we graphed our choices into three categories and then compared which group was the greatest and which group was the least.
As part of our Polar Express week students got to try out hot chocolate before our Polar Express Day. I showed students how to make hot chocolate and they wrote 3 step directions on how to make it. Students also drew pictures on the back of the directions.
Students got to sample the hot chocolate and then we made a class graph on if the class liked hot chocolate or not. It was a very lopsided graph since everyone said the liked hot chocolate!
At the end students cut out a cup of hot chocolate on construction paper and wrote about what they thought hot chocolate is.
This week we’ve been learning about and focusing on spiders. For science & math; we watched videos and read non-fiction books about spiders.
Then students completed a survey on whether they thought spiders were scary or neat, then we graphed the results and drew our own spiders. We also learned the song “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and made our own hand painted spiders to go along with the song.
We read the story There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly and retold the story using an old lady puppet and animals to put into the old lady’s mouth. Finally, students illustrated the main character and the other characters to make a character map.
We learned about graphs last week and how to analyze data. We wrote about what we wanted to be for Halloween and drew a picture on a pumpkin cut out. Then students took their pumpkin and put their pumpkin into one of three categories; fun, scary, or superhero. Then students fill out their own individual graphs and describe which category is greatest, and which group is fewer.
To finish of the week of our fall unit, we read the story Autumn’s First Leaf by Steve Metzger and discussed the problem and solution of the story. We then talked about if we were the character Pointy, what fall color we would have liked to have been.
Later that day, we went on a fall leaf hunt. Students tried to collect all five of the fall colors. We took the leaves back into the classroom and sorted them by color and made a graph of our favorite leaf color.
This Friday was our Valentine’s Day party and we had great time! We started out by handing out the rest of our Valentines for the end of the day and read Valentine’s Day books. We then colored and completed books called I Love…
For shared reading and writing we read the book Will You Be My Valentine and then made a list of Valentine’s Day words. We picked our favorite words and made Valentine’s Day mobiles.
For Math we enjoyed candy hearts math centers. We graphed with our hearts, sorted them by colors, and estimating the number of candy hearts that can fill a bigger heart. We also enjoyed Valentine’s Day snacks.
For science we used alca-zeltzer tabs and water to make candy hearts dance. Students learned how to make hypothesis on simple science experiments. They guessed what they believed would happened to the hearts.
For our last day in our mini unit on The Mitten we discussed the characters of the mitten and made a bar graph on our favorite animal from the story. Then we made mitten mini booklets on our favorite animal.
