Week 12

This cold weather is really making it feel like winter weather. Thanksgiving and Christmas are just around the corner. It's hard to believe how quickly this year has flown by. Let's take a look at our learning in Mrs. Langham's classroom this week.

We focused on the letters Ss and Ii. The students are really enjoying making their own drawings to represent the initial sounds and it is so fun to have them illustrate these words. They can get pretty creative too.

Our sight words this week were "my" and "or". 

We had fun with a new activity called making words. The students make words out of the 5 or 6 given letters by stretching out the sounds in the words. They really enjoy this activity.

Our close read tied in nicely with Veterans Day.

Here is the vocabulary that we learned from this book. We also got to have an assembly and learn from some of our Hill families that are veterans.

In math, we began to learn about addition. We talked about the words that help us to know what to do in story problems such as "total", "altogether", "sum", etc. We had fun making Addition Man to help us with those words.

We practiced using addition mats to help us solve story problems.

We began a new science unit on force and motion. We brainstormed what we already new and recorded our new learning after reading some books about it. We moved wrong ideas to misconceptions.

We talked about different ways that objects can move, such as in a straight line, a zigzag, and round and round. We made a Venn diagram and sorted objects that can be pushed or pulled. Sometimes they can do both.

It was pretty fun to actually explore motion with objects. We compared different sized balls being dropped. We explored race cars on different surface and noticed how the friction of these surfaces changes the speed of the cars and how quickly they stopped. We had fun making some marble tracks and just flat out bouncing balls. 

We began learning about Native Americans this week. We read a story about the Wampanoag tribe.

We also learned about other tribes.

We learned how important the buffalo was to them and got to touch some real buffalo hair.

Due to the fact it was so cold this morning, we did not go to Hill Harbor. We did get to have fun making many crafts and learning more about Native Americans. We made canoes, tepees, totem poles, turkeys, pretended to tan hide, wrote Native American symbols, and water colored sunsets. We even had fun playing in a tepee. They enjoyed choosing what they wanted to do.

Week 11

This week, we reviewed the letters Mm and Nn. I had the students draw pictures that start with the corresponding letter. They did a great job!

Our close read of the week was The Little Red Hen.

We have been working on character, setting, problem and solution and drew them in response to the story.

We compared and contrasted the original version to this funny version.

We worked on the "at" word family and practiced blending and making new "at" words.

We began practicing different blends, digraphs, dipthongs and endings. All of these sounds have motions to help us learn how to spell these sounds.

Our sight words this week were "we" and "in".

In math, we worked on combinations of the number 6. We used a divided bag with counters to represent part/part/ whole. 

We began learning about 2D shapes. The first shape we learned was the triangle. We want students to learn the words "vertices" for corners and "edges" for sides. 

We had fun making Mr. Triangle.

In social studies, we visited the voter's booth at school. We talked about elections and read some books about voting. We applied our learning by voting on what we wanted to do during our inside recess.

In science, we learned that sound is another form of energy. We made vibrations with a tuning fork to see how sound travels.

We began learning about magnets as another form of energy. We read about magnets.

It was even more fun to explore with magnets. We learned that magnets have poles that will repel or attract. We also learned that things that are magnetic contain iron.

We also enjoyed playing in centers.