What a great week we have been having living and learning together!
We began our exploration into folk tales on Monday and have found some very interesting comparisons across the folk tales we have been reading and strong connections to the fairy tales we studied last week. One student even noticed a connection between the story we read yesterday, The Silver Cow and James and the Giant Peach, which has been our read aloud at the end of the day. We have also learned that folk tales tend to come from many different countries and we have read stories from Russia, Norway, Wales, and Nigeria. We have also noticed that the big difference between folk tales and fairy tales is that folk tales offer us a life lesson or message.
We have continued with poetry this week also and what a wonderful experience that has been. We have learned some new forms of poetry, including Haiku, Mask poems, and Clerihew. They really enjoyed and wrote some wonderful Haikus, even some about the shapes we have been learning about in math. Mask poems do not follow a specific formula, but instead ask the author to write from the perspective of an object or animal. Poems were written from the perspective of the clock, ice cream, candy, baseballs, lunch boxes, animals, and many more things. Clerihew poems, like Haiku, also follow a formula: they are four lines long, follow the rhyme pattern AABB, and are usually funny. Once they became comfortable with the formula some wonderful poems emerged. We are going to begin revising and editing our poems and will be publishing a poetry book early next week. I am really excited to see what comes of their hard work.
During math this week we having continued our study of geometry, moving into discovering all there is to know about quadrilaterals. We have noticed that they all have four sides and four angles. Some have all right angles and some have acute and obtuse angles. All quadrilaterals except the trapezoid also have two sets of parallel lines. One interesting thing we discovered is that a square is also a rectangle, a rhombus, and a parallelogram. The square is really special! To further our understanding of angles we found all three types of angle represented by things in our classroom. We began working with geoboards today. These are square, plastic boards with little pegs. Kids use rubber bands to stretch around them and make shapes. We're using them to help us learn how to make different shapes and angles. We will continue our work with the geoboards tomorrow and move into discussing area next week.
Science has also been really interesting this week. We spent some time reflecting on the experiments that we did last week. The reflections have been very detailed and explanatory. We also studied more closely the processes that occur when matter changes states. The kids were wonderful actors, acting out the process of a solid melting into a liquid, a liquid freezing into a solid, a liquid evaporating into a gas, and a gas condensing into a liquid. Today we began to explore density by mixing four different liquids into a beaker. We mixed water, syrup, canola oil, and peroxide. We began to see layers form immediately and for good measure mixed up the solution completely and will check again in the morning to see what has happened overnight. We should wrap up our study of matter next week, but only after we do a few more experiments.
Mr. Hass will return full-time on Monday. I have had a great time working with your kids this week!
Mrs. Jones
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