Mrs. K's Class: April 2012

Friday, April 13, 2012

Synthesizing

Our final reading strategy of the year...snythesizing. It is basically taking everything we have learned all year and putting it altogether. We compared synthesis to nesting dolls and skipping a rock across the river. They came up with these analogies:

"Our thinking gets bigger and bigger like the ripples in the water."
"As the ripples move outward, our thinking gets deeper."
"Our thinking changes as we read more of a story."
"I'm thinking synthesizing is like nesting dolls because they get bigger like our thinking."

I have SMART kids!!! Love their thinking and how much it has grown this year.

Math Madness

We have been all about math the last couple of weeks. The kids are loving learning multiplication! Last week we studied fractions and did some fun activities making Pizza Fractions and Fraction Sundaes. This week we dove into multiplication with lots of hands-on activities. Jelly beans, muffin cups, Easter eggs, and dice all for one day was enough for the kids to say, "math is so much fun" and "multiplication is easy!" Gotta love my eager kiddos.

Fraction Sundaes

Making arrays with stickers :)

Pizza Fractions

Multiplication Exploration

Regions of the United States

Before choosing our individual state to study, we broke up into groups to learn more about the 4 regions of the United States. Each group read about the states in their region. They labeled a map, wrote a fact about each state, and illustrated the landforms for that part of the region. They are SOOO excited about studying their state!!! I cannot even emphasize this enough. I can't wait til we finally are ready to start all the research. (next week)

The 4 Regions of the USA

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Edible Landforms

In preparation for our big state research, we studied the landforms and landmarks in the USA. As a culminating activity, we made edible landforms to showcase our learning. They turned out super cute and were so much fun. The kids really had a blast with this activity!

Traced the outline of USA with edible marker

Adding icing so all the landforms stick

cutting out USA

using the yummy materials to make landforms

Ta-da!

Looks delish!

Had to have a map key to eat

YUM

Water Day

Long time no blog! :( The end of the school year has come in full force leaving me limited time in the blogging world. Sorry about that. I have lots to catch up on as we have been learning so many cool things. First of all let me update you on Water Day ( I know way back at the end of March). Thursday, March 22nd our school celebrated Water Day. We have been studying all about water the last couple of months. The students have learned that countries around the world lack clean drinking water. Here is an overview of the amazing facts we found out:

· People can live for a month without food, but only a week without water.

· While basic needs vary, people need a minimum of 20 liters of water a day.

· The shower you took this morning used 100 liters of water.

· One billion people live on 5 liters (1.3 gallons) per day.

· Every 20 seconds a child dies from diseases caused by a water related illness.

After learning all this information, we had an awesome meteorologist from a local news station come in and talk about the drought and how it has affected Texas. Students walked around different booths in the FAC to learn more, and participated in a Water walk simulating the experience of others that walk up to 3 hours carrying almost 40 pounds of water. We did some further investigation in our classroom. The kids picked an audience, role, and format to present their new knowledge. Some highlights were Mimi creating a song, Devin and Alex becoming news reporters, and Lauren writing a book about ways to save water. Such a wonderful experience!