First - Second - Third Updates

This just got away from me this week, so here are the Tuesday and Wednesday Updates all in one posting.

First Grade - The students finished their visual thinking activity which required that they copy a picture.  Seems easy enough. But, they had the first picture with a grid over it, then using the grid they were to copy each square.  It was very difficult.  But, I see some budding artists in the group.  I was able to bring in "real" art work that used this method to reproduce a photo to a colored pencil drawing while enlarging it in the process.

Next we learned about groundhogs.  Hopefully by now you've seen the activities we did.  I like these weekly reading activities.  So far we've had topics that the children do not have very much background in, which makes it even better.  New information, new learning, reading comprehension, writing skills, spelling, all of these areas are covered with these simple books.  For me the best part is the enthusiasm your children show for absorbing new information.  Next week we'll learn about Abraham Lincoln.

Last, I had the children do a quick write about something they had lost.  This is a tie in to the Frog and Toad story, The Lost Button that we've been using for a different activity each week.

I also sent home the book orders.  Please see the book order post for the details on ordering on line if you haven't seen the order forms.

Second Grade  - The children did a fabulous job again today with the Hands-On Equations.  I hope you are able to look through their work each week and see the level of work they are accomplishing.

Binders have been an issue lately.  It seems each week a different batch of students don't have their binders.  Please help your child to remember this important tool each week.  I wish I had room to store them at school, but I don't and then you wouldn't see what we do each week either.

The second activity today was a round-robin writing lesson.  I gave out different story starts to each student at a table.  They were also given four random words that were drawn from a bag.  Once they read the story starter they continued the story.  After about 10 minutes of writing they gave the story to another student at their table.  This went on for four rotations.  Once the story got to the last person, they had to tie it up and finish the story.  Last, the children had a chance to read all the stories they had contributed to and then with the little bit of time left they shared with other tables.  I can't wait to read all the stories.

Third Grade - In third grade the students continued with the Hanoi Tower activity.  Today, we learned the mathematical route to knowing how many moves each set of discs would take to complete.  We also graphed the data.  It was so much fun to see their excitement with the REALLY large numbers we were dealing with.  We used the calculators to figure 2 ^64 - 1 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,615.  Which is the number of moves it would take to move all 64 discs.

Third Grade Equations Update:  Due to many obstacles, we were not able to get our 3rd grade Equations team together in enough time to practice for this year's tournament in March.  So, I will be introducing the children more to Equations as the school year continues. Then, in the fall, we'll be ready to launch a fourth grade team for Equations 2012 - 2013.