Friday, March 12th
A BIG thank you to UST's Japanese teachers and PTA parents for helping make Japanese Culture Day an exciting event at school this week! Thank you for also helping your children come to school prepared for this special day dressed up and ready to celebrate Japanese culture! The day was filled with many fun activities. Students shared their Japanese class presentations, made fake food (donuts), decorated their own kites, watched a ninja performance, participated in mochi-tsuki, and learned about karate. We also enjoyed a delicious snack and had a yummy bento for lunch. I hope all of the students had a wonderful day!
Social Studies Field Trip
Thursday, March 4th - Grade 1 Group Photos
Math
Telling Time
We started a new math chapter this week focusing on telling time to the hour and half hour.
During this chapter, students will be practicing these skills:
- use the term "o'clock" to tell time to the hour
- use the term "half past" to tell time to the half hour
- read and tell time to the hour and half hour on an analog clock
- read and tell time to the hour and half hour on a digital clock
Science
Air and Weather
This week we started a new science unit all about air and weather. We asked two questions, "What can air do?" and "How does a parachute interact with air?"
What can air do?
To start the chapter, students used a fan, a balloon pump, and other objects (feather, foam ball, cotton ball, tissue paper) to explore what air can do. After the investigation, students shared their observations and we talked about what we learned about air.
- Air can move things from place to place.
- Air can fill up a plastic bag which cannot be smashed flat without letting the air our first.
- Air can fill up a balloon.
- You can feel air.
- Air is all around us.
- Air is matter and takes up space. There are three kinds of matter: solids, liquids, and gases.
- Air is an invisible mixture of gases.
- Moving air is wind.
Science Vocabulary: air, blow, gases, matter, move
How does a parachute interact with air?
During our 2nd investigation this week, the class had an engineering challenge and each student built their own parachute using a napkin, string, dot stickers, and a paper clip. We tested our parachutes inside the classroom and outside at Tomigaya park. During our science discussion, students answered these questions:
- What happened when you flew your parachute?
- What made the parachute float down so slowly?
- Where is the air?
This investigation helped the class learn more about air!
- Our classroom is full of air.
- Anything that falls has to push its way through the air. In order for the parachute to fall, it has to push through the air.
- The amount of air pushing back on the parachute canopy makes it fall slowly.
- When an object moves through air, it is always slowed down by air pushing back on it.
- The push back caused by air is called air resistance.
- When you drop a paper clip by itself, it does not have to push very much air out of its way as it falls. When the same paper clip is attached to a parachute, the system is large so it has to push a lot of air out of the way to fall and so it falls much more slowly.
Science Vocabulary: parachute, engineer, system, push, air resistance
Reading
We Can Be Our Own Teachers When We Work Hard to Figure Out Words
During reading we have been learning how to use everything we know to get through the hard parts of our books.
This week our class practiced these reading skills:
- Sometimes when we’re reading along we come to a part that just doesn’t feel right. We read the words, look at the pictures and think, "That can’t be right!" We need to stop and try something to figure out what’s going on. We can think, what will help me figure this part out? We ask ourselves,
- "Does it look right?"
- "Does it sound right?"
- "Does it make sense?”
- We want to sound like we are telling an interesting story! Stories are much more interesting when they are told fluently, not when we have to keep stopping to fix words. It's important to read fluently, even after we get stuck! We do this by using reading strategies to fix up the hard parts and then we reread the same part fluently so that it sounds great!
- "Readers read, fix-up and read again fluently."
Writing
Creative Writing - Writing a story
This week students continued sharing their made-up stories with their classmates and are preparing to publish their writing. Our class talked about what we do when we publish - create a neat, final copy of your work and include all the things you changed and added when revising and all the corrections when editing (spelling, capital letters, end marks). When publishing, students will create a book (cover, 3 pages for beginning, middle, and end).
Have a wonderful weekend!
- Ms. Allison