Newsletter: February 26, 2016

Hey Everyone!

Here's a photo journey of our most recent work...

Reading Workshop/Social Studies

The kids have been conducting a class study of China. We are doing this collaboratively to
help scaffold the kids into the process of research.

After collecting a number of facts individually, we created categories in which to
sort what we had found so far. These included Food, History, Geography, Celebrations,
and Fun Facts (for the left overs).

Once the kids had sorted their facts they were placed in one of the the
groups/subcategories. Each group looked through the facts on their board
then conducted further research to answer any lingering questions - important
bits of information that had been overlooked.

After doing all this they had quite a bit of information. The groups are now sorting this
information into even smaller subgroups and creating posters to share this with us.

This whole process not only helps us learn about another culture but it also provides
us an opportunity to put our reading skills into action. We have been studying non-fiction
text features over the past week or two. The kids accessed some of these features
when researching and will not use them again when creating their posters. Their posters need to
have different sized fonts, bold words, photos with captions, maps, and illustrations.

We've been taking our research experiences with China and using them to
support us in our own individual research projects. Each of the kids have selected a country
they want to know more about. In the photo above you can see that we have
special folders to help us organize our work.

The folders have spaces where we can write down the things we think we know, the things
we confirm in a book or on the internet, and questions we are wondering about. There's
also a space for any misconceptions we may have had - those "I Think I Know..." items
that turned out to be wrong. We had a number of these during our class study of China. However,
identifying the fact we develop misconceptions from sources such as Kung Fu Panda and other
places helps us think about how we come to develop our knowledge and beliefs. We have
to be careful what to believe! 

The kids then sorted their facts onto sheets of paper. Each sheet of  paper organized facts about
a specific subtopic within their country research. These included: homes, schools, foods, celebrations
and traditions, people, and geography. The kids selected which subtopics they were most interested
in researching.

Here is an example of this sorting.

Math

We moved into time with math. We began with looking at our schedule on a time line to get a sense of linear time movement throughout the day and to visualize the movement of the hour hand in a straight line. This became the basis for understanding the schedule throughout the day and the duration of our activities.

As you all know, the kids then went home to examine their own schedules, graphing them on their own time lines. Everyone brought back their time lines, and we began finding out how to display the times on the graph, on paper, and on an analog clock. Moving from the time line to the clock face provided a great entry point for understanding the slower movement of the hour hand compared to the minute hand to make accurate clock drawings.

With our understandings of duration and scheduling, we moved into planning our "dream days." In addition to necessary activities like sleeping and eating, everyone added into times for things they would do on their own special day. We tried to think of not only how long activties might take, but also at what time could each thing realistically happen. Can't go to Disney World if it's closed!

We finished up the week looking at clocks more closely. We started by examining why we call it a "half an hour" and "quarter after." We connections between the hours and minutes, looking at 15, 30, and 45 minutes. We made our own clocks as well, noticing there a lot more ticks than numbers. We will continue using our hand-made clocks to examine time and time displays. 

Writing

Add photos of kids doing cursive