Holiday Books 1,000 yen | To help the students celebrate the holiday season G1A's class parents will be ordering holiday books for our class. These books will be wrapped and given to the students when Santa visits UST in December. As usual, the books are funded by the parents. The cost is ¥1,000 per child. When you have a moment, please send ¥1,000 to school in an envelope with your child's name on it. Thank you for your help! |
Readers Build Good Habits
This week students read with their reading partners to practice book introductions. We learned that good reading partners introduce their books to each other before they read together, showing that they have a good understanding of their story.
Book Introduction
- What’s it called?
- What’s it about?
- Who are the characters?
- What are they doing?
- Don’t give away the ending!
The class also learned that readers give each other time to grow, sharing the reading with their partner and giving them helpful tips as they go. While reading together, students gave their partners reminders of the habits they can try when they're feeling stuck.
Examples:
- You should... (You should look at the picture.)
- You can try to... (You can try to look at all parts of the word.)
- Maybe ________ will help. (Maybe trying both vowel sounds will help.)
We also started our next reading unit all about nonfiction. Our first lesson helped the students think about topics they're interested in and explore our nonfiction library.
After choosing a "just right" book they'd like to read, students shared what they already know about their topics, then they began looking at the cover, the title page, and the first few pages of the book. When they finished previewing the book, they wrote about something they learned.
Small Moment Stories
Writing this week was all about publishing! Students chose one of their small moment stories to publish. They worked on making a neat, final copy of their story to share with others, including creating and adding a cover to their book. Students will celebrate their writing next week by sharing their work on the board and reading their stories aloud to the class.
Shapes and Patterns
During math we started the week using flat shapes to make pictures. Students made their own pictures using different shapes, then explored how to put shapes together to make new shapes (e.g. How many ways can you make a hexagon? I can use 6 triangles.). They practiced this by using rhombuses, trapezoids, triangles, and hexagons to fill in shape outlines. We also made models with solid shapes and named the shapes in the models.
Our class also identified flat shapes and solid shapes around the classroom, collecting objects (e.g. glue stickers, classroom bell, tissue box) to trace. We also traced the sides of our shape blocks to see what flat shapes we could make.
To end the week, our class learned about patterns. We practiced recognizing repeating patterns involving flat shapes and solid shapes.
Air and Weather
How does a parachute interact with air?
On Monday we took our parachutes to the park to test them outdoors. When we returned to school, I asked, "What is different about flying a parachute outdoors compared to indoors?" Students share their observations (e.g. Outdoors wind carried the parachute sideways or even upward!).
This investigation helped the class learn even 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
What happens when air is pushed into a smaller space?
Next our class focused on pushing air. Our focus question was, "What happens when air is pushed into a smaller space?" Students reviewed that air is matter and takes up space. We used syringes (plunger, barrel) and flexible plastic tubes to create a two-syringe system to learn about air. We will continue this investigation next week.
Science Vocabulary: tube, plunger, barrel, syringe, system
- Ms. Allison