Hello Families! Happy New Year! I hope you all had as nice of a holiday as I did. It is exciting to be back!

The children are learning now about how parts of objects have specific properties that allow them to work with other parts to carry out a particular function. Something may not work well or at all if a part of it is missing, broken, worn out, mismatched, or disconnected. To further their learning I gave them a task: to build a table out of Lego's. It had to be a flat surface, and the table had to have legs to support it. After each child made their table, I told them they must take a leg off their table. They were sad to see that now their table was slanted! Their next task was to see if they could find and use a recycled material to support the table again. They enjoyed trying different things. Many children used play dough, others used straws. Isabella A. used floam- she was so proud of it! She even included a centerpiece!

Before break, the children were investigating the different states of matter. They enjoyed carrying out experiments to see physical results, and getting to create their own experiments based on what they are interested in learning about. Extending from their investigations before break, the children are now investigating the changes in properties that occur in objects and materials and how changes of position of an object is a result from pushing and pulling. Last week, the children had the opportunity to investigate what affects an object to sink or float. Does shape affect it? Does weight affect it? The children planned and implemented an investigation to test various clay shapes (eg., a clay ball, a clay block, flattened clay with edges) to determine how shape affects the ability of a material to float or sink in water. For the last few tests, the children were able to think of a shape they were interested in knowing if it sunk or float. Michael discovered that if you form the clay ball into a boat-shape, the clay will float! The children were excited to find out that shape does affect whether or not an object will float or sink.

The next investigation was student-directed and taught, for they were able to find different materials to test if weight affects an object to float or sink. We did a feather altogether, but the children's creativity flowed as they chose different materials to test such as wood balls, corks, tissue paper, beads, packing peanuts, and so much more! On their recording sheet, they were only expected to find 3 different materials to test, yet they didn't want to stop after that! The lesson went on farther, and the learning deepens.

 This upcoming week we will be testing what various materials float and sink, such as plastic, cardboard, Styrofoam, etc... Taking everything they have learned, the children will then have to design and build their own small boat using the materials they discovered floated in water. They need to make sure the shape of their boat is correct, for they know now that shape affects if it will sink and float. We will test their boats to see if they can float for a specific amount of time, and then add pennies to their boat to see how much weight their boat can carry before it sinks. The children were so excited to start making their boats, some even decided to write down the materials they discovered would work and others made blueprints of what their boats would look like. It is going to be an exciting week!

The children have also been busy learning about measurement. They are still getting practice with measuring in non-standard units of measurement such as feet or hand spans, but now they starting to measure to the nearest inch on rulers and tape measures. They really enjoyed using tape measures to measure different parts of the body such as their friends wrist or ankle. They are also beginning to learn about the quarter hour on a clock. Any chance you can to ask your child what time it is will carry their knowledge from school to home. The children are learning the vocabulary "quarter-after, quarter-before, quarter-past, and quarter-to."

In reading and writing, the children have been having fun learning about homophones. Homophones are words that sound the same, but are spelled different and mean different things. For example, "aunt" and "ant" are homophones. They are also working on a new reading strategy: skip a word and come back to it. When children come to words they don't know, some stall on the unknown word and are unable to move on. These children must learn strategies to help them move forward. Your child is working on the accuracy strategy "Skip the word, and then come back." This strategy teaches a reader to skip over the word until the end of the sentence or passage. Then, the reader should back up and re-read the sentence again, using the first letter or letters of the skipped word and their context clues to decode the unknown word.

One last thing: On Wednesday, January 16th, it is "Appreciate a Dragon Day" at the Green Library. The children will choose a favorite dragon from literature and get creative-- read about them, write about them, draw them, paint them, make them! A dragon make-and-take craft will be available all day.  Ask your librarian for further details!




Have a great week!

P.S- Thank you to all those who donated more pencils to the classroom. We were running low!