Happy Holidays, HA families!!!

 FIRST GRADE LANGUAGE ARTS

We continued with anagrams this week.  Most of the students were greatly challenged by this.  I encouraged the students to persevere.  After our talk about the importance of perseverance, the students put forth great effort:) The students worked individually, in pairs, and in small groups.  They had letter tiles available to them to help manipulate the letters into different words. 

SECOND GRADE LANGUAGE ARTS

 While watching The Tale of Despereaux, the students continued working on their character trait activities.  We discussed how the movie varied greatly from the book.  For the character trait assignment, students solely referenced the character as he was in the book.  We finished the movie, and the students finished their character trait activity!  We had a fun and productive time together this week:)

THIRD GRADE LANGUAGE ARTS

  Up until this week, all of our examples of folklore have been very old stories.  On November 10, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior.  With the tragic loss of 29 crew members, a modern legend was born.  I read a poem to the students, we listened to a song by Gordon Lightfoot, and we watched part of a documentary on the Edmund Fitzgerald.  After a discussion on color, mood, and tone, the students created interpretive drawings of the modern legend.  You may click here for the documentary SS Edmund Fitzgerald Documentary  Here's another link that may interest  you/your student https://www.shipwreckmuseum.com/edmund-fitzgerald/

FOURTH GRADE LANGUAGE ARTS

We continued the timeline portion of our biography project.  As I mentioned last week, the timeline requires a lot of organization and collaboration.  The students continue to make me proud.  They worked together to edit the timeline.  Once they completed that, they started transferring the timeline onto large butcher paper.  This step of the timeline requires planning, organization, and collaboration.  It also requires patience, because some students may not be able to do their portions until after other students have completed their parts.  I'm very pleased with their attitudes toward each other and the project.

FIRST GRADE MATH

Making observations and sorting objects based on their properties forms the basis of much of math.  It is especially important in geometry.  Recognizing and understanding properties of shapes is more important than learning names for them.  Our lesson this week involved sorting by attributes.  We sorted people and shapes by their attributes.  In the first picture, the two students in the ‘circle’ are both in Miss Plinovich’s class.  In the second picture, all the students are first graders in HA math.  In the third picture, the two students both have on green shirts.  In the last picture, both the students are boys.  I did not get pictures of them sorting shapes by their attributes.  At first, they worked in pairs to sort shapes by their attributes.  At the end of class, we worked as a whole group taking turns sorting shapes by their attributes.  

SECOND GRADE MATH

Is a square a rectangle? Yes!  Is a rectangle a square? No! Vertices, angles, polygons, parallelograms, and closed plane figures, oh my! As you might guess, we discussed plane shape attributes and definitions.  I emphasized the shape attributes versus just visually knowing a shape's name by sight.  After the plane shapes review, I introduced prisms.  The students enjoyed working in pairs to build prisms out of straws and pipe cleaners.  It was quite challenging and required teamwork.  While the students were working, we discussed some similarities and differences between plane shapes and prisms.  It was a nice introduction to prisms.  

THIRD GRADE MATH

As you may recall, the students recently worked with a 700's chart to explore arrays and find mathematical patterns.  This week, the students created puzzles for a 300's chart.  They had creative and mathematical freedom.  Some students chose to create their puzzles solely based on mathematical patterns.  Some students created their puzzles based on visual design.  Regardless of their inspiration, creating the puzzles required a good sense of mathematical patterns.  Each student will be given a copy of all the puzzles to solve.  A couple of students made their keys (solutions) already.  The student mathematicians are enjoying being teachers by creating worksheets for their HA classmates.

FOURTH GRADE MATH

We took a little break from algebra this week.  We strained our brains with a logic puzzle.  It is said that logic puzzles exercise parts of the brain that may not be stimulated otherwise.  Logic puzzles boost brain activity and require systematic, critical thinking.  The students and I definitely felt the burn of a good workout.  I apologize for not getting a pic this week.