Hello everyone! Here's the scoop on all our classroom happenings this past week...
Science:
This week we continued our study of the human body, examining the lungs, heart, and blood. We discussed how our heart and lungs work together to carry oxygen and nutrients all through our bodies, and also learned about the components of blood. Ask your child, true or false… if all the blood vessels in your body were placed in a line, they would wrap around the world twice (true!). Also ask your child, is a human heart shaped like a Valentine’s Day heart? The kids were quite surprised to realize that those are two quite different things. Another VERY cute misconception about the human body… many of the students thought that your heart “beeps”! Cue the “awwwww…” ;) We also learned that a child’s heart beats faster than a grown-up heart, and a baby’s heart beats the fastest of all!
A highlight of the week was getting to make “model blood.” First of course, we discussed that making a “model” of something meant it wasn’t actually the same size as the thing, and it wasn’t made out of the same material, but still represented the parts in a way that would help us learn. Here’s the recipe if anybody wants to try it at home!
Model Blood:
· Water in a clear container, to represent plasma.
· Red Orbeez (small squishy translucent balls made of plastic polymer – we ordered ours from Amazon), to represent red blood cells
· Cotton balls, to represent white blood cells
· Pieces of pipe cleaners covered in tape, to represent platelets (I had to get inventive with that one! If someone can think of something small and sticky that would work better next year, let me know! ;P)
All the children participated in making our model blood, taking turns adding each component. To be certain that we were anchoring our “blood model” to the real-life function of each blood component, the students repeated a chant as they added each one…
· As they added the red Orbeez, the students chanted, “I’m adding red blood cells into the plasma!” and then with the second handful, “Red blood cells carry the oxygen!”
· As they added the cotton balls, they chanted, “White blood cells hunt and eat the germs!”
· As they added the sticky pipe cleaner pieces, they repeated, “Platelets stick together to stop bleeding!”
The students loved creating this multi-sensory representation of human blood!
Another highlight of the week was when Luke’s mom Kim helped the students listen to their own hearts with a stethoscope. She shared with us that she had to study for 8 years to become a doctor! She told us that sometimes babies’ hearts are beating so quickly that it is hard to hear the beats. She also taught us that there are really two sounds in a heart beat, that doctors call, “lub-dub.”
P.S. We always love when parents with a special knowledge of our topics of study come to class to teach us more! In fact, we usually send out a formal invitation requesting it, but didn’t for this unit of study because it is so short this year, sandwiched between the Happening and our study of winter holidays after Thanksgiving. However, having Dr. Shumate teach us was so valuable that we want to go ahead and extend the invitation anyway… if you are in the medical profession and would like to come to share with the class about what you do, or just something really cool about the human body, please let us know! The students have been really fascinated by this topic of study, and we will gladly overlap it into the next few weeks if necessary.
Literacy:
We reviewed the letters “n” and “f” this week, and our sight word was “says.” We continued practicing how to “tap out” the sounds in C-V-C words (like “has” or “fun”), and also started learning about clapping syllables. As part of our review of letters the students always brainstorm words that begin with that letter, and for our review of “f” we tried hard to think of two and three syllable “f” words. We were very pleased when one of the students came up with “family,” and we realized it had three syllables in it! We also began discussing and identifying homonyms, as we realized that words like “fall” have multiple meanings.
Our Literacy Workstations this rotation include:
· Working with Ms. Louderback, developing reading and comprehension skills at each pair of students' level of readiness.
· Working with Mrs. K, practicing letter formation and handwriting skills.
· A spelling board game, practicing tapping out the sounds in CVC words.
· A science station, practicing recognizing vocabulary words from our study of the human body, and finding the matching pictures and 3D models of each body part (heart, lungs, brain, etc).
· A listening station, listening to the audio book There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly and responding to it with a picture and writing.
· A fun new activity called a “Write Around the Room.” This game is a little like a scavenger hunt, as students go around the room hunting for picture cards and, in this case, writing down the ending sound in the word the picture depicts (ex: for a picture of an elephant, the student would write down a “t”). This is a great way to incorporate movement while practicing skills!
· A stamping station, where the students stamp missing letters on words. Depending on the child’s level of skill, they may be practicing identifying beginning sounds, ending sounds, or stamping out the whole CVC word.
· An art station, where the students create a fall-themed craft that practices many of our sight words.
· An iPad station, practicing literacy skills and letter formation. For those of you interested in downloading some of the apps we’ve been using to practice at home, the Handwriting Without Tears: Wet-Dry-Try app is a great one for handwriting practice, and McGraw-Hill Word Wonderland is also a good one for covering a variety of skills at different levels.
· Writing station, working on Writer’s Workshop pieces.
· Checking out and reading books from the library. (Help your children remember to return books they are done with, so they will be ready to check out new ones when it is their turn!)
The students worked hard on their Writer’s Workshop pieces this week as well – many of them are getting very close to finishing their first teaching books! We will work on “revising” and “publishing” them, and will have our first Author Celebration some time before winter break.
Math:
Another great week in Math!
This week we took a look at how we get information from graphs and how they can be horizontal or vertical. We then made our own graph of our favorite thanksgiving pictures. The turkeys won!
We also introduced addition number stories and the children made some addition stories of their own on the promethean board. They chose a starting amount and then made more join them to find the sum of the two numbers.
Perhaps the most fun was had when we all pretended to be balance pans! The children were introduced to a type of scale called a balance pan as a weighing tool this week. We learned that when two sets of objects are the same weight both sides of the balance pan are level. However, when one set of objects is heavier the balance pan tips, the heavier side of the balance pan going down and the lighter one going up. The children worked in pairs pretending to be balance pans and weighing a range of objects in plastic cups. They put their arms out to either side of them and then decided which cup was the heaviest, making the arm with heaviest objects go towards the ground. You can see photos of our very own human balance pans on our shutterfly website.
In other news:
We had a great time with our Parent Academic Helpers this week -- Beckett P’s mom Robin did a great job getting us started with our skeleton craft, and Luke’s mom Kim did double-duty, not only teaching us about the human heart, but also supervising a game during Literacy Workstations. Big thanks to both of them!
We are also so excited about the new class books purchased at the Book Fair by Anna, Kol, and Lily F! We can’t wait to read our new books together next week. Thanks so much to the Nelson, Leibowitz, and Florence families!
Have a great weekend!
Science:
This week we continued our study of the human body, examining the lungs, heart, and blood. We discussed how our heart and lungs work together to carry oxygen and nutrients all through our bodies, and also learned about the components of blood. Ask your child, true or false… if all the blood vessels in your body were placed in a line, they would wrap around the world twice (true!). Also ask your child, is a human heart shaped like a Valentine’s Day heart? The kids were quite surprised to realize that those are two quite different things. Another VERY cute misconception about the human body… many of the students thought that your heart “beeps”! Cue the “awwwww…” ;) We also learned that a child’s heart beats faster than a grown-up heart, and a baby’s heart beats the fastest of all!
A highlight of the week was getting to make “model blood.” First of course, we discussed that making a “model” of something meant it wasn’t actually the same size as the thing, and it wasn’t made out of the same material, but still represented the parts in a way that would help us learn. Here’s the recipe if anybody wants to try it at home!
Model Blood:
· Water in a clear container, to represent plasma.
· Red Orbeez (small squishy translucent balls made of plastic polymer – we ordered ours from Amazon), to represent red blood cells
· Cotton balls, to represent white blood cells
· Pieces of pipe cleaners covered in tape, to represent platelets (I had to get inventive with that one! If someone can think of something small and sticky that would work better next year, let me know! ;P)
All the children participated in making our model blood, taking turns adding each component. To be certain that we were anchoring our “blood model” to the real-life function of each blood component, the students repeated a chant as they added each one…
· As they added the red Orbeez, the students chanted, “I’m adding red blood cells into the plasma!” and then with the second handful, “Red blood cells carry the oxygen!”
· As they added the cotton balls, they chanted, “White blood cells hunt and eat the germs!”
· As they added the sticky pipe cleaner pieces, they repeated, “Platelets stick together to stop bleeding!”
The students loved creating this multi-sensory representation of human blood!
Another highlight of the week was when Luke’s mom Kim helped the students listen to their own hearts with a stethoscope. She shared with us that she had to study for 8 years to become a doctor! She told us that sometimes babies’ hearts are beating so quickly that it is hard to hear the beats. She also taught us that there are really two sounds in a heart beat, that doctors call, “lub-dub.”
P.S. We always love when parents with a special knowledge of our topics of study come to class to teach us more! In fact, we usually send out a formal invitation requesting it, but didn’t for this unit of study because it is so short this year, sandwiched between the Happening and our study of winter holidays after Thanksgiving. However, having Dr. Shumate teach us was so valuable that we want to go ahead and extend the invitation anyway… if you are in the medical profession and would like to come to share with the class about what you do, or just something really cool about the human body, please let us know! The students have been really fascinated by this topic of study, and we will gladly overlap it into the next few weeks if necessary.
Literacy:
We reviewed the letters “n” and “f” this week, and our sight word was “says.” We continued practicing how to “tap out” the sounds in C-V-C words (like “has” or “fun”), and also started learning about clapping syllables. As part of our review of letters the students always brainstorm words that begin with that letter, and for our review of “f” we tried hard to think of two and three syllable “f” words. We were very pleased when one of the students came up with “family,” and we realized it had three syllables in it! We also began discussing and identifying homonyms, as we realized that words like “fall” have multiple meanings.
Our Literacy Workstations this rotation include:
· Working with Ms. Louderback, developing reading and comprehension skills at each pair of students' level of readiness.
· Working with Mrs. K, practicing letter formation and handwriting skills.
· A spelling board game, practicing tapping out the sounds in CVC words.
· A science station, practicing recognizing vocabulary words from our study of the human body, and finding the matching pictures and 3D models of each body part (heart, lungs, brain, etc).
· A listening station, listening to the audio book There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly and responding to it with a picture and writing.
· A fun new activity called a “Write Around the Room.” This game is a little like a scavenger hunt, as students go around the room hunting for picture cards and, in this case, writing down the ending sound in the word the picture depicts (ex: for a picture of an elephant, the student would write down a “t”). This is a great way to incorporate movement while practicing skills!
· A stamping station, where the students stamp missing letters on words. Depending on the child’s level of skill, they may be practicing identifying beginning sounds, ending sounds, or stamping out the whole CVC word.
· An art station, where the students create a fall-themed craft that practices many of our sight words.
· An iPad station, practicing literacy skills and letter formation. For those of you interested in downloading some of the apps we’ve been using to practice at home, the Handwriting Without Tears: Wet-Dry-Try app is a great one for handwriting practice, and McGraw-Hill Word Wonderland is also a good one for covering a variety of skills at different levels.
· Writing station, working on Writer’s Workshop pieces.
· Checking out and reading books from the library. (Help your children remember to return books they are done with, so they will be ready to check out new ones when it is their turn!)
The students worked hard on their Writer’s Workshop pieces this week as well – many of them are getting very close to finishing their first teaching books! We will work on “revising” and “publishing” them, and will have our first Author Celebration some time before winter break.
Math:
Another great week in Math!
This week we took a look at how we get information from graphs and how they can be horizontal or vertical. We then made our own graph of our favorite thanksgiving pictures. The turkeys won!
We also introduced addition number stories and the children made some addition stories of their own on the promethean board. They chose a starting amount and then made more join them to find the sum of the two numbers.
Perhaps the most fun was had when we all pretended to be balance pans! The children were introduced to a type of scale called a balance pan as a weighing tool this week. We learned that when two sets of objects are the same weight both sides of the balance pan are level. However, when one set of objects is heavier the balance pan tips, the heavier side of the balance pan going down and the lighter one going up. The children worked in pairs pretending to be balance pans and weighing a range of objects in plastic cups. They put their arms out to either side of them and then decided which cup was the heaviest, making the arm with heaviest objects go towards the ground. You can see photos of our very own human balance pans on our shutterfly website.
In other news:
We had a great time with our Parent Academic Helpers this week -- Beckett P’s mom Robin did a great job getting us started with our skeleton craft, and Luke’s mom Kim did double-duty, not only teaching us about the human heart, but also supervising a game during Literacy Workstations. Big thanks to both of them!
We are also so excited about the new class books purchased at the Book Fair by Anna, Kol, and Lily F! We can’t wait to read our new books together next week. Thanks so much to the Nelson, Leibowitz, and Florence families!
Have a great weekend!