Positional Words, Paper, and Popplett...Oh! My!

What a busy week back from Spring Break we have had! This week during our reading lessons we have been studying about positional words (prepositional phrases). Through exciting and sometimes silly games and songs we have been learning about top/middle/bottom, over/under/on, left/right, and above/below. Check out our show below and see all the fun things that we have been up to this week. Be aware...you just might find yourself humming along!

https://vimeo.com/122811355

(Featured songs or games include: a rousing rendition of Top, Middle, and the Bottom, a "Roll a Dice" game with Over/Under/On, a chance to kick along to the "Cupid Shuffle" while learning left/right, and a "Pin the Bird on the Cloud" game for Above/Below.)

Another engaging experience that we enjoyed this week was Digital Learning Day! On Wednesday, we participated in a Kindergarten carousel where we visited each Kindergarten teacher and learned to use a unique app that provided us with a chance to show off our learning. In Miss Hensley's room, we enjoyed Chatterpix for Kids where we made our sight words talk. Mrs. Pena shared Popplett with us and allowed us to create our own bubble maps where we drew items that started with a letter of our choice. Finally, Miss Todd showed us how to use 30 Hands where we created slides with pictures and recordings of our leveled readers. We had a wonderful time and are now able to use these apps in our reading stations to make our own creations. Here is a show highlighting our day. Check it out and see what all we learned on Digital Learning Day!

https://vimeo.com/122716909

In math, we have been working hard to solve addition and subtraction problems, using model drawing. This is the math program that they use in Singapore. Research has shown it to be very effective. Model drawing is a way for children to not only solve a story problem but to be able to prove why the answer is true. In order for our students to have a solid foundation in number sense, we find the ability to fully explain your reasoning behind your answer to be a very important skill. Model drawing allows our students the opportunity to practice doing this. Below you can see how we were able to solve problems that Miss Todd challenged us with this week.

We have become so very talented at solving problems that Miss Todd encouraged us to make up our own problems and solve them, as well. Here are some of those problems. We hope that you like them! See if you can make up a model drawing problem of your own!

Finally, in science we explored ten different types of paper throughout the week. Each day we preformed a different experiment on our paper to see what would happen and compared the reactions of each piece. In our show below, you will see the results of each experiment and hear about what we learned from them! Our show includes experimenting with writing on paper, folding paper, and putting water on paper. Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below. 

https://vimeo.com/122876439

Dr. Suess Day

This week we celebrated Dr. Suess's birthday! We began our Dr. Suess Day with a special breakfast of green eggs and ham! It turns out that we DO like green eggs and ham!

In addition to enjoying a special breakfast, we were also allowed to dress up in our Dr. Suess attire. Here are a couple of pictures of some of the super cute outfits that we wore from home. We have also included a show of the hats that we made ourselves at school, as well.

https://animoto.com/play/v9TV03pfkc48RmX0Z261

During our fun day, we also created a book for the Cat and the Hat filled with special hats of many different colors. He even had a silly hat. His favorite hat of all turned out to be the red one! I wonder why?

 We finished our day with an exciting day of drumming in P.E. We had the opportunity to learn a traditional African song and had the chance to play the drums along with our drum leader. Here is one of the songs that we learned. We hope you like it! Leave us a comment and let us know what you think about our fun day! Thank you for sharing it with us!

https://vimeo.com/121217409

Western Fun Day

Yee Haw! Our cowgirls and cowboys have been hard at work learning about our state symbols and regions. Throughout the week, we enhanced our lessons about Texas with other subjects such as art and language arts. We created cowboys and cowgirls during an engaging self portrait opportunity.  Here are some pictures of our finished products. 

We also combined our adjective lesson with our Western Fun Day experience and allowed our students to describe their cowboy/cowgirl attire using adjectives.  Then, we took pictures of these items and created a keynote of our amazing adjectives. 

As an exciting final event this week, we celebrated Western Fun Day where we learned a Texas dance, rode on a pony, and enjoyed some real Texas chili and cornbread. We have included some pictures from our day. You can also watch our show below to join in the fun! Let us know what you think by leaving us a comment! Enjoy!

https://vimeo.com/120855808

We had another exciting surprise today when we went to music...it was snowing! :) We had to take a picture to commemorate this experience because it does not snow very often in Texas. Here is our picture from our fun surprise! Enjoy! :)

Legoland

What a wonderful field trip we had to Legoland. This event culminated our unit on tall towers and bridges. After learning about what a building needs to remain strong and how the parts of a building work together as a system, we traveled to Legoland where we created our own tall towers and tested them on the earthquake tables. Watch our show to see our adventure. Let us know what you think by leaving us a comment!

https://vimeo.com/120217706

Under Construction

During our study of systems this week, we talked about tall towers, bridges, and nests. We discussed what a building would need to have in order to withstand natural disasters and be a good structure for a home. Here are the towers that our children created in class this week. These towers were the inspiration for our towers that we built at the end of the week at Legoland. We have also included pictures of the bridges that we created and the nests that we made to try to save Humpty Dumpty from cracking when he fell off the wall. Leave us a comment and let us know what you think about all of our exciting constructions from this week.