For our Storytellers unit, students have been mapping out story elements and writing drafts of their stories. Some students have started using the iPad app, “Toontastic,” to make cartoons out of their stories! For Reading, students have new Reading A-Z fictional stories to read, and comprehension quizzes and literacy activities to go with them. Last week for Math, we worked on Touch Math strategies for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. This week students will continue with the Touch Math, and also do a Bridges Number Corner assessment of fundamental skills. Students also continue predicting which 3-D shapes will appear next on our calendar cards this month.
Last Thursday we went to Jefferson High School for the Adapted PE field day. Students had a blast doing activities like body bowling, golf, basketball, dancing, obstacle course, magnet fishing, bubbles, and fun-noodle hockey. The weather was beautiful and we ate our lunches on the field before returning to school.
This Monday for our Superflex activity, we read a story about “Feeling Good About Myself”, and we discussed times where each of us feel good about ourselves. For Art, we finished making our pinch-pots, then this week we showed students how the kiln works to fire the pots. This week we will glaze them, and then we will explain that the kiln is used again to fire the glaze. We are continuing our science unit “Things That Go” and learning about Newton’s Three Laws of Motion. Last week we tried flicking a coin at a stack of coins to “magically” force the bottom coin out from under the stack. We tried the same thing with checkers, but it worked better with coins. We also flicked a single coin at a row of coins to watch how the force is transferred through the coins and moves the one on the far end. On Monday, we made paper “helicopters” that work in a similar way to the maple seeds that spin as they float to the ground. We are also learning how Force, Mass, and Acceleration affect the flight of Angry Birds, and we plan to make our own Angry Birds slingshot and targets as a real-world motion experiment!
