This month and last month, we've been making books in Writer's Workshop! We've been focused on adding different details to illustrations to best help our audience or readers understand what is happening or being taught in our books. We learned to include the indoor and outdoor background, show expression on our character's faces, add lines to show movement or motion and to use a close-up drawing to show detail and teach more about a topic. Some of us have been using our alphabet charts to add words and sentences to our books. After the title and author's name were recorded, our illustrations were finished and words were added, the books were ready to publish. Washi tape is added to the spine of the book to show that it is finished and ready to be read by others! After we were able to publish our books, it was time to celebrate all our hard work by reading to others in our school! Sharing our writing is important because it is a time to reflect on our accomplishment and acknowledge that we are writing not just for ourselves, but for an audience. Many of us proudly shared our writing with teachers and staff around the school. All were impressed!
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We have been having a lot of fun this year working with numbers! We have worked through writing, counting and decomposing numbers one through five and now we are working on writing, counting and decomposing numbers up to ten. This week, we made some math bracelets. Each student had to count out ten beads and string them on her pipe cleaner. After we created our ten bead bracelets, we practiced separating the beads to nine and one, eight and two, seven and three and so on. We noticed that every combination equaled ten and realized that there were so many ways to make ten! After, we played games with partners. First, one partner would cover some of the beads with her hand. Other partner could use her bead bracelet to find out how many beads were covered. We plan to use these throughout the year, so feel free to play with the math bracelet when it comes home! Doing this is important to build our number sense in general, and lay a foundation for understanding number grouping and place value in the future. That way, we won't just see numbers for the name they hold, but we can understand them with more flexibility.
We have been excited about our Sweet Potato Dig for weeks! To make sure everyone had some knowledge about sweet potatoes before our field trip, we read a funny book about planting and picking an enormous sweet potato. There, we learned that the sweet potato is already a root, and when planted, it grows root hairs, vines and more potatoes! We also conducted a little science experiment by letting a sweet potato rest in a shallow bowl of water for a few weeks. It grew many root hairs and even a vine! We voted to plant it in soil in a pot on our balcony. We even decided to name him "Rootie". Unfortunately, the weather was not on our side and our field trip was rained out two times! We were patient and were very excited to FINALLY pick potatoes last week. First, we cleared the vines from the plot and used our hands and shovels to pull out the sweet potatoes! We found many different shapes and sizes of sweet potatoes. After awhile, the farmer came along with his rake and moved around the dirt to reveal a few more potatoes that were hiding. After collecting our potatoes, we asked the farmer a few questions that we had brainstormed before the trip. Some of our Japanese speaking students volunteered to translate for us. We asked him when he plants the potatoes, and he told us that he plants them in the spring and waits almost six months to harvest them. We also asked him about the largest potato he has picked and he told us it was as long as his forearm. (It definitely wasn't as big as the sweet potato in the book we read). When we got back to class, we counted the sweet potatoes and discovered that we had 115! After counted, we decided to clean and sort the potatoes by size. We wrote down the sizes and drew circles to measure the potatoes. Most of our potatoes were small and medium sizes. Additionally, our class voted to make sweet potato chips. Unfortunately, the experimental recipe for chips turned out to be...not so delicious. A parent suggested a comparable recipe where we could fry the potatoes so they would have a crunchy texture like chips, so we decided to make Daigaku Imo (University Potatoes). We practiced our cutting skills by chopping the potato into small pieces. The recipe instructed us to soak the potatoes in water before frying. We used a strainer to separate the potatoes from the water and fry them in oil. They only needed to fry for a short time, so we practiced counting down until the potatoes were ready. After the potatoes were fried and crisp, we poured a special sweet sauce on them and used a spoon to mix and evenly coat the potatoes. Then, we prepared bowls for our friends and enjoyed our yummy treat with toothpicks! The teachers shared the leftovers with the other teachers in the school and they agreed that the Daigaku Imo we made was very delicious!
Teacher Kyla and Teacher Kathleen's Class |