Hi everyone! Sorry we were off last week. Our trimester was ending, and we had to get grades and report cards ready.
One of the fun things that we did in word block this week focused on synonyms. It was a springboard from an activity that one of our colleagues gave us. Students had to find synonyms for the word small. We loved the synonym choices because they included words that students were not familiar with. It required them to look up each word in the dictionary and determine if it meant small or not. It wasn't easy, and they often had to draw conclusions to make their decision.
The next part of this word block activity involved helping students use the synonyms correctly. The synonyms for small and big are used in different situations, and we wanted students to practice using them correctly. We separated their uses in their reading notebooks, and they could refer back to their notebooks when engaging in the next activity.
It was then time to practice using these new words in sentences. The kids really did a great job, and everyone used them correctly. This was important for us because in the past when students have used a thesaurus to choose a synonym, they don't choose appropriate ones for their writing. You can click on this google link to get a sentence template for this activity.
The girl who created this synonym page told me she is not finished with the picture. I apologize. I'll replace this picture with the completed one as soon as she finishes.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving! We have conferences at the beginning of next week, and then hope to have some time to relax with our families!
Once again it was a short week for us. Kim had committee meetings on Thursday and Friday, and Anne was out on Friday. Needless to say, we find ourselves once again in the middle of things!
One activity that we did complete was our word block/grammar lesson on conjunctions and compound sentences. We began by asking the students, "What is a conjunction?" None of them knew, but they quickly caught on while we were reading the book, If You Were a Conjunction by Nancy Loewen. After enjoying reading about the many ways conjunctions are used, we introduced the students to compound sentences, and how conjunctions can be used to connect two individual sentences. The students were then given a bag of sentences and conjunctions. They had to match the sentences, select the appropriate conjunction, and make new compound sentences.
The next day, we gave the students random pictures from the internet. They worked in partners to generate compound sentences about their picture. It was a little more challenging than we had anticipated, but everyone did a great job! These two activities were simple, and relatively quick, but really helped our students solidify their understanding of conjunctions and compound sentences. Hopefully, they will carry this into their writing, as we encourage them to not only use simple sentences, but also use compound and more complex sentences as well.
We also worked more on our narrative writing. As we were reading through some of the students' original narrative stories, we noticed most of them were not adding enough details to develop them. So, we once again looked to the Smekens website for guidance. We found two websites that have student anchor papers. We decided this would be the most effective and efficient way to help show our students how developed narratives look and sound. We highlighted and annotated the anchor papers so we could use the techniques we found in our own stories.
We not only focused on details and development, we also worked on making sure our narratives had appropriate and interesting transition words and phrases. We discussed the fact that one of the elements of narrative writing is moving the story along in chronological order, and that it is important to let the reader know when you are moving a long in time. We decided to keep a list of transition words in our writing notebooks for quick reference.
One last thing we want to mention is an App that many of you may have heard of before, but Kim just learned about it at her committee meeting yesterday. It's called Chatter Pix. Kids take pictures of objects, draw a mouth on the object, and then record their voices. When the clip is played back it looks as if the object is talking. Oodles of activities could be created that involve kids using this App to demonstrate knowledge and understanding. The first thing Kim is going to do is have her math students write and solve a multiplication problem that involves drawing arrays. The students will need to explain what the array is showing. They may want to draw a character and make it talk, or they may want to have a pencil do the talking, or most likely they will find some other object to do the talking. This will be a fun way for students to demonstrate their knowledge of what the factors in a multiplication problem mean. While this is low on Webb's Depth of Knowledge chart, knowing this information is critical to their success in future math concepts.
Here is a YouTube video explaining how to use Chatter Pix. So easy!
We hope you have a great weekend!
Kim and Anne
Friday, October 31, 2014
Happy Halloween! Luckily we are not in class with the kids right now because we know they'd be bouncing off the walls, and we would get nothing accomplished. Unfortunately, we are at an Institute Day which seems long even though we get out two hours early. During our breaks we will take the opportunity to type this blog.
Our Force and Motion unit in science continued this week. We really feel that with all the hands-on activities our students are really internalizing the concept of forces and the vocabulary that is needed for understanding it. After exploring forces with commercial tops, our students designed their own tops using everyday items. This was a good activity to have the students really think about what makes a top work. Surprisingly, after all the exploring they did with tops most groups were not successful in creating a top that could spin for 10 seconds. The positive thing that came out of this lesson was the fact that the kids had to figure out why their top didn't work. This led to great conversations, and most of them were spot on.
Many of our kids stated that one reason their top did not spin was because their top was too heavy. So, the second part of our top designs addressed how weight affected how long a top spins. In fact, that was our question to them--"How does weight affect how long a top spins?" Of course many of them hypothesized that their top would not spin at all or it would spin slowly and for a short time. It was fun for them to discover the exact opposite of their hypotheses happened.
As we reflected on the results of this activity, we were able to introduce the students to the term momentum. We then wanted to see how well students could reflect on their learning throughout these top activities. They did a great job incorporating their understandings of the science concepts to what actually happened with the tops, and they had a lot of fun doing it!
Next week we will be moving on to the concept of gravity, and we will have a Flying Cup Experiment to share with you. We can't wait because it has been a big hit in the past, and it has been awhile since we have taught it!
