January 23-27th 

It was another awesome week in room 9! We were busy with projects, learning and fun!  Here is a look at our week - 

 I Can Develop Listening Skills / I Can Sequence Main Ideas in a Story

This week students started listening to me read the short novel, Our Friend Hedgehog, This short novel is a great way to help students develop their listening and comprehension skills.  As we are reading each chapter, we stop, talk about, and draw key moments.  Using longer texts is also a great way to help students develop their prediction and summarizing skills over the course of a longer narrative. Here are a few of the discussions questions we have explored as we have been reading - 

Discussion Questions

Why do you think that Hedgehog lived on an island with only Mutty as a friend?

Do you think the illustrations helped or hurt the telling of the story?  Explain your answer.

Have you ever lost a friend?  How did it make you feel?

Hedgehog was nervous about traveling in Mole’s tunnels.  Have you ever done something that made you nervous?  Tell us about it.  How did you feel afterwards?

Is asking others for help good or bad?  Why?

I can apply what i have learned to design/build a structure. I can communicate my ideas with my peers. I can cooperate with my peers to complete the task. 

This week we applied all that we learned about hot and cold to design and build a structure that keeps ice from melting. Students worked hard to share their ideas, draw a design of a structure, select materials and then build their structure. On Friday we then tested our structures and had a ton of fun observing how effective our structures were.

 I can model a unit fraction by partitioning a whole object or set into equal parts.  I can compare different unit fractions of the same whole. 

This week in math we have been learning that fractions are when we divide/partition a whole - like a pizza into equal parts and look at how many pieces we eat compared to the whole. We spent tine folding different shapes like a circle, square and triangle to discuss this concept and to label the fraction. Students learned that the bottom number in a fraction (denominator) is the total number of parts of a whole and the numerator is the number of parts that we have.