April 14, 2013

Good morning!  This week we spent an abundant amount of time getting ready for Open House.  We wanted to make sure we finished up on all of our exciting projects so our students' parents could see how hard they work all day long.  It seemed like a whirlwind, but it was worth it.  The kids were so proud of their accomplishments and their classrooms.  The most popular attraction was the podcast the kids performed of I Am The Dog I Am The Cat.  If you remember, that was the book we used for our lesson on adding voice to our writing.  Unfortunately we cannot upload the podcast due to several children not having permission for their work to be on the internet.

This week in math we introduced the students to fractions.  We did many fun activities and projects with fractions, but our favorite was making fraction pizzas inspired by Amy Lemons.  We gave the students two ten-inch circles to make their pizzas.  The bottom red circle was the "whole" and the top yellow circle was divided into six equal parts.  Each part need to be decorated with different toppings.  Then the students wrote fractions that described their pizzas.  Below are pictures of our pizzas, but if you would like a more detailed lesson plan you can visit Amy Lemons' teacherspayteachers store.

We could not let this project be completed without incorporating a bit of writing.  We asked the students to work in groups to brainstorm endings to this sentence starter: Numerators and denominators go together because... The students did a great job persevering through this challenge.  We felt it was important for the students to engage in this activity to solidify the meanings of these two words before we move on to fractions of a set.  These fractions always prove to be more difficult than fractions of a whole.

Our reading theme continues to go along with our Social Studies concepts.  We introduced Natural Resources this week.  We began with a concept mural as a pre reading strategy to front-load the students with information they would be reading about in their Social Studies texts.  At the end of the lesson students wrote about what they read.  

The concept mural is a strategy developed by Pamela Farris and can be found in the December/January 2006 issue of the Reading Teacher.

The following day we showed a Brain Pop Jr. video on natural resources as a review.  Another student came up with a brilliant idea.  He suggested we take notes on the video.  The kids were really excited to do this, and we were really excited that they wanted to incorporate writing while watching a video.  Writing notes reinforced the concepts of natural resources more effectively than just watching the video.

We are now in the middle of reading a reader's theater script titled "Talking Trees."  Our focus for this reading lesson is on determining the main ideas and details.  After reading the scripts in small groups, the students had to decide what the main idea of the entire script was, as well as what smaller main ideas were embedded in the script.  We are recording the main ideas and details on a graphic organizer, which we will share with you next week.  We have not decided if we are going to perform and podcast this script.  It all depends on if our students suggest it or not.  We are really interested in letting them lead the direction of the lessons.

Have a great week. We will see you next Saturday on the blog!  

Kim and Anne