In these photos you can see the cozy, comfy places we find to read. You’ll also see a few students using Playaways, recorded books, as they read along. We just got a Donors Choose funded so we’ll be getting more of those for students to use soon!
It kind of stinks to head into a long weekend with some wet and dreary weather but some fun activities for indoor recess helped! As well as the hopes that our days off would be prettier.
Dismissal takes a long time at our school (not surprising since we have more than 20 buses as well as walkers and car riders). The students who are last to be dismissed wait quite a while. These two made good use of their time!
After two days of using various blocks to build arrays, many students wanted time to play with those blocks. So for indoor recess on a rainy day, we pulled them out. Others opted for some coloring pages.
To practice building arrays, we imagined working for a candy company and designing candy boxes. We made boxes to hold 6 chocolates, 12 chocolates, and 24 chocolates.
As we explore multiplication and division, one of the strategies we’re learning is to create arrays. To build our skills, we could use blocks to create the arrays before drawing them.
I happened to be walking back to our classroom after a meeting one day recently and I heard beautiful music. Luckily I realized it was coming from my class in music! I popped in to grab a few photos and listen a little longer.
Last week we returned to our study of multiplication and division. To get started, students worked a word problem and a few students shared the strategy they used. That was a big help for students who were having difficulty with the problem. And they all seem to learn better from each other!
The students don’t often pick this activity for morning meeting, but when someone does, many of them cheer. Everyone stands back to back with a partner. On the count of three, they strike a pose as a strong person (showing off muscles), pirate (covering one eye like an eye patch), or hula dancer (waving arms back and forth at about hip height) and turns around. The goal is to have you and your partner pick the same one. The result is often not that, but it does involve a lot of giggles.
After doing the water experiment, we took the data we collected (and it was different for each group) and we graphed it. Then we were able to analyze and figure out what temperatures were most efficient for dissolving solids.
