This month, we've been studying shapes! First, we noticed the attributes (sides, corners or vertices) of 2D or flat shapes. After discussing them, we went on a shape hunt around the school to notice flat shapes in our environment! After mastering flat shapes, we were introduced to 3D shapes or solid shapes. These shapes have flat shapes as "faces" and have vertices has well, but edges instead of lines. We had fun comparing flat and solid shapes by building both types with model magic and toothpicks. It was very challenging to build the 3D shapes! Some of us have brought in shapes from home to add to our shape museum. If you find any more at home, please send in and we will share and display in the class next week!
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All week, we've been looking forward to the annual Omochi Pounding at the ELC! So we all knew what to expect, we read a book about making omochi. The first step was to wash the rice. Many of us took turns doing this. We let the rice soak so it would be ready for the parent volunteers to cook. We were lucky enough to be the first class to pound omochi at the ELC for 2017! We dressed in happi coats, which are worn for festivals and special events in Japan. Next, we each took turns pounding the rice three times! Our classmates yelled "yoisho!" as each of us pounded. After, we went back to our classroom and rolled our omochi. We had the choice to eat it with soy and nori, kinako, anko, or to enjoy it without any toppings. Each of us kept a tally of the different types we ate. At the end of the day, we referred to our tally sheets and added up the amount of omochi that our WHOLE class ate! It was a lot of counting, but we knew we could do it. The day before, we had made some estimates, or "good guesses" about how many our class might eat. Our estimates ranged from 30 to 1,000! But today, we discovered that we ate 170 omochi all together!
This month, we have been talking about the ways our families celebrate! It is a special way to bond with your family and bring everyone closer together. We were given a task by our teachers--we had to plan a party for our parents to show them how we care about them. After sharing our family celebration posters, we noticed some things were common among many of the family celebrations. First, we noticed that there are often decorations at celebrations. We made colorful paper chains and snowflakes to decorate for the party. Also, we noticed that gifts are often given or exchanged. We made a special watercolor painting inspired by the artist Wassily Kandinsky. His paintings were influenced by music, so we listened to a variety of music while painting to inspire us. After the gifts were finished and framed, we made wrapping paper so the present would be a surprise. We noticed that wrapping paper is often patterned, so we designed our own wrapping paper with patterns. Additionally, we wrote cards to our parents. We used our letter sound knowledge to do this and wrote using the many lowercase letters that we have learned to write. Next, noticed that many celebrations had feasts, so we asked parents to bring a special family dish to share. We decided we would take care of the plates, bowls, utensils, napkins and drinks for the party, so we went shopping at a nearby grocery store. We had to do a lot of math before hand...we estimated how many people would come to the party (46), counted the materials we already had and made a shopping list so we wouldn't forget what to buy. When we were at the store, items were packaged in varying quantities, so sometimes we had to skip count by ten. Other times, we had to compare numbers to make sure we had purchased enough supplies. For instance, we bought a package of 50 napkins and knew that would be enough because 50 is greater than 46. Sometimes, we couldn't find what we needed, so some of our Japanese speakers politely asked the store workers for assistance. It was a lot of work to carry all the items back. We were EXHAUSTED after! Additionally, we noticed that there was entertainment at celebrations, so we selected some family and holiday songs to sing. We practiced ALOT and even watched a performance of ourselves so we could reflect on what we did well and what we wanted to change for the performance in front of parents. On the day of the event, we practiced using all the lowercase letters we learned to make labels for the food items being brought for the feast. Finally, the parents arrived for our celebration! We greeted them, showed them the family posters, took photos in our photobooth (another important element of celebrations) and showed them how to expertly cut snowflake decorations! We performed our songs and presented the gifts and cards to our parents. We ended with the feast! It was a wonderful celebration. Finally, after all the parents left, we enjoyed taking photos in our origami photobooth!
Bee-Bots are here! Recently we were introduced to our six fantastic Bee-Bots. Bee-Bots are mini-robots that need to be programed by us! They move forward, backward, and turn left or right at the programmers command. We have loved playing with our Bee-Bots! We've used the grid-mats that came with our Bee-Bots, but also discovered that we could build mazes for them using the blocks in the construction center. Check out the mazes we have built so far! After exploring with Bee-Bots, we were ready to practice building our own robots. In small groups, we built the lego robot "MIlo, The Science Rover" with the instructor for STEAM builders, which is an afterschool program that will be piloted at the ELC in January. In pairs or trios, we followed directions to build the robots, then used the iPad to program the robot to move. Some more robots will be coming to our classroom soon, and we are excited to program them as well!
If you'd like to know more about Bee-Bots, visit https://www.bee-bot.us !!! We have a recent addition to our room--mailboxes! Since the beginning of the school year, we have been making cards for friends in our class and now we have mailboxes to deliver and recieve letters and cards. We are learning to read our friends' names to deliver the letters and we are learning to decode some of the words our friends have written in the letters! Additionally, we've learned that it is important to write who the letter is for by writing "to" or "dear" and that is important to sign a letter using "from" or "love" so the reader knows who the letter is from. We are also learning that it is important to respond to a letter if the writer asks a question. We've even invited some parents in to write or deliver letters. Please stop by and deliver a note if you have the chance. The teachers can also help deliver notes if they come in folders. We're excited about building our writing skills through letter and card making!
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!
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 Our study of force and motion began with some playful time with ramps and marbles set out in our construction area. Students had time during our choice time and small group time to experiment with the ramps and figure out how to balance, connect and stabilise them to allow marbles to move. We noticed how the slopes of the ramps forced the marble to move and roll. We also noticed that we could push the marbles along the ramps to make them move if there was no slope. Next, we noticed that some type of force needs to make an object move. We explored some objects and used a force to make them move. We spun, swept, rolled, wiped, dabbed, shook and clicked. All these motions could be classified as a push, pull, or both! Next, we needed to experience pushes and pulls in more depth and fully synthesize the meaning of these terms. First, we participated in an investigation to push small objects across our notebooks by blowing them with a straw. We discovered that heavier objects took more blows or pushes to travel across the paper. Lighter objects or round objects took only a few pushes! Our next investigations gave us more experience with pulls. We pulled bags across string tied between two chairs, which made a pulley. When we pulled harder or with more force, the bag moved more quickly. When we pulled slowly or more gently, the bag moved more slowly. It was fun to hide different objects in the bag and surprise our classmates waiting at the other end of the line. Additionally, we investigated the amount of force it takes to pull baskets with varying amounts of weight inside across the room. The baskets with less weight required less force and were easier to pull more quickly across the room. We determined that none of the baskets were hard to pull, but we definitely had to use more force and strength to move the basket with the most weight inside. After we had synethized our knowledge of pushing and pulling, we had to use our new knowledge to design a machine to move a marble across the room as quickly as possible! We worked in small groups and made a quick plan for our devices. Next, we got the materials we needed and tested them out. Check out our prototypes! Many of us chose to build ramps that allowed gravity to push the marble across the room, but some of us designed a device to pull the marble across the room! There was repeated testing of our prototypes and we had to make many adjustments to our simple machines to successfully get the marbles across the room. We are excited to discuss and share our creations by video with the class next week!
Teacher Kyla and Teacher Kathleen Our recent self portraits sparked a discussion of different shapes and lines necessary to draw our bodies and features. We noticed we needed straight lines, curved lines, dotted lines and more! After this discussion, we completed an quick, individual line study. We brainstormed and practiced drawing many lines with crayons, our chosen art tool for experimenting. We will use these lines again and again, whenever we are drawing our self-portraits, pictures in our books in Writer's Workshop or drawing observations in our notebooks. After that, we chose our favorite line to paint to create a collaborative line study. We liked a variety of lines! Additionally, we experimented with mixing different shades of color. We discovered that when we added white to a color, it made the color lighter. When we added black, it made the color darker! We only needed to add a little bit of black to darken our color, but we needed to add a lot more white to create a lighter shade of color. After we made many shades of our color, we made a painting with them. We named our paintings and noticed the different lines that we used to create our artwork! Since we had so much fun mixing shades of color, we have been experimenting with color mixing in the art center. We are exploring many combinations including red-orange, grey, neon green and, of course, brown! Let's see what other colors we will make!
Kyla and Kathleen's Class |