This week we had a great time at Champion Black Belt! Students were able to run free and use their whole bodies to push, pull, limp, jump, and have fun doing the exciting physical activities. Afterwards we piled back onto the bus to Ochi-Gil park were we ate and played even more on the amazing play structures, hipline, and hammocks. It was a great day to let out some energy, spend time with friends, and work with each other outside of school. I was so very very happy and impressed with every ones excellent behavior, it made for such an enjoyable day!
Back in class we spend English going over poetry and introducing the idea od figurative language while sharing our thoughts on poems. We also looked at the use of subject and object pronouns and noun phrases. With Ms. Mary students have been having a go at writing some simple poetry. I love reading what student’s have wrote and hope to see them continue to practicing expressing themselves creatively. Word study has also been going well, but not everyone is making the marks I know they are capable of! Let’s be sure to also write out our words at home in addition to morning in-class activities!
For math we have been been working with the commutative and associate properties of multiplication. Next week we will finally break into algorithmic multiplication but our class is ready to work with double and even triple digits with all the different techniques we have mastered; equal groups, arrays, number lines, skip counting, and understanding that the order of our factors may affect our model, but the product stays the same! The idea is that everyone has a tool in their arsenal to help them breakdown problems and work them out in the method that works best for each individual. It is still a great idea to keep practicing and drilling the multiplication table at least up to 10 (it will help us so much with math later on!) and we will have plenty of that in class too.
In IPC we look a look at the circulatory system focusing on the heart and blood vessels. We connected our prior knowledge of the muscular system and respiratory system to understand that the heart is a muscle and that it pumps the blood which carries the oxygen inhaled by the lungs. I am always impressed by how much everyone retains and can explain in class, I think we will have some fun next week with the digestive system.
We continue to do touch typing and working on our computing skills with programs such as our online reading library epic! and the new platform Education City which offers some great supplementary math and English activities and practice. I would like to remind everyone that laptops and tablets are amazing tools – but they are fragile and expensive. Please try to handle such devices with care; there has been a lot of rough handling and dropping of the computers. We are lucky no screens have cracked so far, but let’s show respect to our learning tools as if they were our own.
Finally, in the homework folders there is a lot of checked in-class work going home. Please remove these papers from the folder before turning it back in. Feel free to check out some of the word study and math practice we’ve done through the week, then please recycle 🙂
Mrs. Leah