Here is our schedule for this week:

Monday-B Day (P.E.)  We also have Library.
Tuesday-C Day (Health & Technology)
Wednesday-D Day (Art)
Thursday-A Day (Music)
Friday-B Day (P.E.)

What to know for this week:

This week, our theme is "Nighttime."  We will learn about objects in the night sky and nocturnal animals.  We will even get to do some interesting activities with shadows!

Apples

This week our theme was "Apples."  We read some neat books about apples and we talked about the different parts that make up an apple.  During math, we continued working on various kinds of patterns.  To incorporate apples, we made our own patterns out of apples.  Students were split into groups of three and were given paper apple cutouts to sort.  They had four different colors to choose from: red, pink, yellow, and green.

After the apples were sorted by color, the groups had to decide how to organize their apples in a pattern.  Some groups used only two of the sets of apples; other groups used three or all four sets of apples.  A few groups even did two separate patterns.

This group did two separate AB patterns.

 After the apples were glued down on the paper, students had to go back and write the pattern.

Here is an AABBCCDD pattern.

In math, to warm-up our brains, we have been practicing something called an open number line.  It has been helping us with our number sense.  We put a number line on the board with only the first and last numbers labeled on the number line.

In this example, I started with the number one and ended with the number ten.  I asked them where they thought two would go.  I asked, "Would I put two closer to one, or closer to ten?"  These kind of prompting questions were helpful in the beginning.  They quickly figured out where five went on the number line because they said five is right in the middle of one and ten.

After they got the hang of it, we played a game.  I used the open number line and asked them to guess a number I was thinking.  I placed the numbers students guessed on the number line and I would tell them "My number is greater than _____  or my number is less than______."  This visual helped students narrow down the range of numbers that could possibly be the one I was thinking of.  They loved the game, so we tried even harder numbers.  I was so impressed by how well they picked up on the open number line.

Lots of students wanted to make their own open number lines.  They did a great job! Here is an open number line that a student made all by himself.  He has zero at the beginning and one hundred at the end.  He knew exactly where to place the number fifty!

We have been working on practicing our letter sounds during Reading Workshop.  To challenge ourselves, we picked different items in the room and tried our very best to spell them with sounding out our words.  Students wrote their words on Post-It notes and then stuck them on the objects they were spelling.  Here are examples of our awesome sounds spelling!

 Tar (Chair)

 (Legos)

(Dry-erase board) 

Descovery Table (Discovery Table)

Cichin (Kitchen) 

(Stool)

This is a wonderful activity that you can do at home (you don't have to use Post-It notes.  You can have your child write down their words on a piece of paper.)

As we studied apples, we came up with questions, such as "What would happen if we placed several different kinds of apples in a container of water?"  Some students thought the apples would float, while others thought they would sink.  Others thought the bigger apples would sink and the smaller apples would be lighter and float.  We tested our hypotheses.  

We discovered that all of the apples floated regardless of size!

Did you know that you can preserve apples even after you cut them open?  When you cut open an apple, the air makes its flesh turn brown.  We tried to figure out if there is any way to stop this process.  We took three apple halves and to the first one, we did nothing to it.  The second apple was soaked in water.  On the third apple, we coated it with lemon juice.  Here is how the apples looked after about twenty minutes.

We checked on the apples again towards the end of the day.

We left the apples out all night and checked on them again the next morning.  The air turned the apple brown.  The apple covered in water also turned brown.  The apple covered with lemon juice still looked white in the middle!

On Thursday, we cut up apples and put them in a slower cooker with water, sugar, and cinnamon.  We stirred the slow cooker throughout the day and a delicious smell filled our entire room!  At the very end of the day, we enjoyed some yummy and sweet apples.  

We have a little turtle friend in our classroom (whom the students named "Tortoise") who likes to catch people doing good work an following directions.  I start by finding someone being  a good listener and I give them Tortoise.  He will sit with that person while they are on the carpet or working at their table spot.  The student with Tortoise gets to pass him to a classmate who is doing good work and so on, and so on.  They love Tortoise!

Here is our schedule for this week:

Monday-B Day (P.E.)  We also have Library.
Tuesday-C Day (Health & Technology)
Wednesday-D Day (Art)
Thursday-A Day (Music)
Friday-NO SCHOOL FOR STUDENTS.  The teachers have a Professional Development day.

What to know for this week:

This week, our theme is "Apples."  If you could send in an apple (any color) by Thursday of this week, that would be great!

Picture Day is September 27.  Information on Picture Day came home last week.  Also, there is no school for students on Friday, September 28.  This is a Professional Development Day for teachers and we will participate in an "Unconference."  Teachers from across the district will share their expertise in technology and how we can better use it in the classroom.

Colors of the Rainbow

This week was so much fun as we had the opportunity to explore colors!  We did some very neat science experiments, read books about colors, and we incorporated colors during math as we learned about graphing and patterns.

To get a good visual for graphs, we made a graph out of all of our shoes!  Students sat in a circle and we decided how we would sort our shoes.  They came up with three categories: shoes with Velcro, shoes with laces, and flip flops.  Each person took a turn placing his or her shoe in the correct area on our graph.

Next, we counted how many shoes were in each group.  We had 5 shoes with Velcro, 15 shoes with laces, and 1 flip flop.  As a class, we discussed how this graph is helpful if we want to know right away which group had more or less shoes.  We figured how how many more shoes were in the laces group compared to the Velcro and flip flops and how many shoes we had when we added them all together.

During our Colors of the Rainbow week, we graphed M & M'S.  Students were given an M & M graph and to get prepared, they had to look at each candy on the bottom of the paper and color it the correct color.  

Students then had to sort their M & M'S by color and place them in the appropriate place on their graphs.  Next, they had to color in the correct number of bars on the graph that corresponded with the number of M & M'S for that color.

After everyone colored their graphs, we did a gallery walk.  During a gallery walk, we walk around each table and look at our friends' work.  Then we talk about things we noticed in other students' work.  Some people noticed they had the same number of green M & M'S as other people, others noticed that one student had a four-way tie among four of his groups of M & M'S.  After our discussion, we ate some of the M & M'S (not too many) and saved the rest for an art project.

Here are some students during our gallery walk.

We also learned about patterns this week and how there are different kids of patterns.  Some patterns are called an AB pattern, and we also looked at AAB patterns.  In math, we partnered up and made our own patterns out of unifix cubes.  Our patterns were so interesting!  Some groups made AB patterns.  Others made AAB patterns, AAABBB patterns, or even ABC patterns!

The students noticed patterns in our classroom!  Some people had patterns on their clothing.  

Our carpet also had a pattern to it! 

During reading workshop, we read a few books with color themes.  We read "Mary Wore Her Red Dress" and "Who Said Red?"  We noticed that authors use different themes in their stories.  Sometimes authors write books about letters (like "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom") and other times they might right about numbers (like "Chicka Chicka 1, 2, 3").  This week we decided the books we read used colors as their theme.  Knowing what the author's theme is can help us make predictions and understand the story.

During science, we had so much fun with our color projects and we learned a lot!  One day, we filled two cups with water and added blue food coloring to one cup and yellow food coloring to the other.  Then, we took two paper towels and place one in the blue water and the other in the yellow water.  We took both clean ends of the paper towels and placed them in an empty cup.

The students made predictions about what they thought would happen.  Here are some of the predictions they came up with:

• Nothing would happen.
• The blue water and yellow water would travel up the paper towels and stop at the top of the cups.
• Some of the blue water would travel into the empty cup and some of the yellow water would travel into the empty cup.  They would form a blue layer of water and a yellow layer of water on top.
• Some of the water from the blue and yellow cups would mix in the empty cup and make green water.
• All of the blue water and all of the yellow water would travel into the empty cup to make green water. There would be too much water in the cup and it would "overflow like a volcano."

Each table had this experiment sitting on it.  Throughout the course of the day, students could check their predictions as they worked at their table spots.

Over time, some of the blue and yellow water started traveling up the paper towels.

By the end of the day, our colors had combined and made green water in the middle cup!  Luckily, it didn't overflow like a volcano onto the tables!

This week, we incorporated learning about solids, liquids, and gases into our Colors of the Rainbow theme.  One day, we wondered if it was possible to make brand new crayons out of the ones we already had.  We broke some of the extra, old crayons that were in the art supply area.  We decided to use a crayon maker to help us with our experiment.

Students mixed dark and light colored crayons in the crayon maker.  There is a light bulb in the crayon maker that heats up the metal part (which is where the crayon pieces sit).  We made predictions about what would happen when the metal heated up.  Lots of students thought the metal would get so hot, it would melt the solid crayons and turn them into liquid.

Our predictions were correct!  The crayons melted.

Next, we poured the liquid crayons into the crayon mold and let it cool.  Students thought the crayons would turn back into a solid when they were no longer hot.  They were right again!  We passed around the brand new crayons we made.  Some students said the swirled colors of the crayons reminded them of the Earth or outer space.

Another project involved melting more crayons.  We looked at crayons that had been hot glued to a canvas and thought about what would happen when a blow dryer was used on them. 

Some students thought the crayons would get so hot, they would fall off of the canvas.  Others thought the crayons would melt but stay on the canvas.

After just a few minutes, we could see that the crayons were melting.  They were slowly turning from solid into liquid.  They stayed on the canvas.  Also, as the crayons melted and slid down the canvas, they started to mix and make new colors.

On Thursday, we mixed Kool Aid and water together and put the mixture in ice cube trays.  The students predicted that once this mixture went into the freezer, it would become ice.  Some thought it would take a couple of hours to freeze, some thought just a few minutes, some students thought it would take all night, and others thought it would take a couple of days to freeze.  By the next morning, the liquid mixture turned into solid ice cubes.  We would use these colorful ice cubes for our experiment on Friday.  

Each student was given a small cup of Sprite.  We discussed how the Sprite was liquid and there were lots of little bubbles in the Sprite; this was a gas.  The gas bubbles stuck to the sides of the cup and they also traveled to the top of the Sprite.  Next, we added our Kool Aid ice cubes one at a time.  First, we started with the yellow ice cubes.  The Sprite rose in the cups, but the color stayed the same.

Next we added our orange ice cubes and immediately, the Sprite started turning orange.  The ice started melting and released some of its color.  We continued to add the rest of the colors: green, red, and purple.  We discovered that the Sprite rose in the cups every time a new ice cube was added.  The solid ice cubes started to melt into liquid and release color into the Sprite.  Soon, the colors started to mix.

We were able to drink our experiments and they tasted delicious!