Storyline Online: Brave Irene - Snow To Be A Drum - BHM No Mirrors in my Nanas House - BHM Somebody Loves You Mr. Hatch - Valentine's, Kindness & Caring Bookflix: Show Way - BHM Language & Math After parent teacher interviews some families asked about the balance between literacy and mathematics homework (e.g., why so much Borrow a Book and no formal math homework?) TDSB Homework Policy: "There is a strong connection between reading to or with elementary children every day in English or in one’s first language and student achievement. As a result, homework assigned in the early grades shall more often take the form of reading, playing a variety of games, having discussions and interactive activities such as building and cooking with the family." The links to online, interactive math activities as well my suggestions for extension activities (e.g. Feb 3rd Blog: "Check out this interactive Patch Tool" or "You can get your own mental math pages from Math-Aids" or Dec 18th Blog "To skip count by twos, try this 'create a mystery picture' game To practice place value and skip counting (number patterns) try playing this Place Value Hockey Game (select level 1)!") are intended as math homework. While it is not something that's submitted back to class for review, it is expected that families are completing some of these activities at home as extension and review. This week we watched H2-Oh-No! on Media Net: Students learn about the importance of water to all life on Earth and that the Earth already has all the water it will ever have—we can't make any more. "Professor T-Bone" explains the cycle of water and how water moves around the Earth—from the ground, through rivers and oceans, to clouds through evaporation, and back down again through precipitation. Then, students did a "Think About it!" activity "A question that I'd really like to think about water is ..." and "Here's my thinking about it ..." - we're starting to practice the scientific method: Ask a Question, create a Hypothesis! Here are a few of our questions: I wonder how ice freezes onto your window? What happens to the chlorine in pool water, does it evaporate too? I don't know why or how water drops from the clouds! How does water get underground? Does our water (that goes down the sink's drain) get restored? We're going to be reading lots of books, watching TDSB videos and doing some experiments over the coming months to try to answer these questions! One of the experiments that we've already conducted: what happens to snow when we bring it inside? On the first day we collected tons of the white fluffy stuff off of our classroom's windowsill! We filled a mason jar right to the top ... but once it had melted, we only had a tiny, little bit left in the bottom of the jar. We wondered why? Maybe because it was the "fluffy" type of snow, full of loose snowflakes and air bubbles? So, the next day we went out to the playground and tried to find really dense, hard packed snow and pushed and pushed and pushed until we couldn't pack any more into the jar! You know what? it took the snow A LOT longer to melt (we still had a floating ice chunk at the end of the day) and we only had 1/3 of the jar filled with water? We wondered why!? *We're going to look into the 3 states of matter, solid, liquid and gas, and look at the tiny molecules of water when they're in each state. For a head start - try playing this States of Matter Game Check out our integrated writing & science question: You have just invented a water collection robot. Write an explanation of how your new invention works and why it collects water. *This was a 3 day activity! First, students brainstormed, drawing images, diagrams, step by step pictures with labels and important, key words. The next day, they took that plan and put it into action - they were expected to write AT LEAST 3 sentences: an introduction (the WHY it's important part), the Donna Details of how it works (at least 1 sentence, 2 or 3 are even better!), then a wrap-up, or conclusion sentence that revisits the WHY of your invention (e.g., "That is why my robot collects water, to help give it to people who do not have their own clean water.) ... YES, your 6 and 7 year olds are in the early stages of learning paragraph writing! For math, we've been revisiting Number Sense and have been trying to solve some winter math problems. For example, Two girls had 84 snowballs, but then they threw 49 in their fight. How many snowballs do they have left? Take a look at our W.I.N.ing (Words, Images, Numbers) problem solving strategy. Another problem we had: There were 12 friends building a big, rectangular snow fort, so there's an inside and an outside. How many friends might be building on the outside of the walls while some friends build on the inside? Can you find more than one way? Check out this W.I.N.ing strategy! Words, Images and Numbers help to explain her mathematical thinking: Other HPAS Skating Party was so much fun! Thanks to all our volunteers who were able to make this a amazing day happen. Whole school events like that are a blast - I love being a part of the HPAS community. Be sure to check out Twitter - I tweeted a lot of photos from the day's activities. Sorry I wasn't able to find my skates :( They're lost somewhere in my shed or garage ... I promise - next year I will be fully unpacked and ready to skate up a storm with you!
0 Comments
|
In our Room 108 Classroom Community, we foster an engaging, respectful and caring environment. I aim to balance a consistent program with flexible responsiveness to students' individual needs. Archives
November 2017
Categories |