Superkids, Math and Science Oh My!
Dear Parents,
We hope that you enjoyed the mini-break we all had last week! I enjoyed talking with each of you during parent-teacher conferences as well. It’s hard to believe that the first part of our school year is coming to a close!
We’ve had a busy two weeks with working hard on our math, science experiments and celebrating Constitution Day and Wood Acres 50th birthday!
The class finished up their books on Alf this week. With Alf, we started to focus on the middle sounds in words like tap, pot, bag, and cat. Next week, we will write in our journals about what kind of adventures we’d like to take with Alf! As a fabulous fun Friday surprise last week, I built a mock campfire in the center of our room. Last Friday, the class ate lunch around the campfire and a good time was had by all. So much so, I think we might keep the campfire around as a new piece of flair to the room. As the days (hopefully) get cooler, it’ll be fun to warm our bones by a pretend fire 🙂 This Friday we “roasted” marshmallows over our campfire and then enjoyed s’mores! This may be the best fabulous fun Friday of them all 😉
This week we also met our newest SuperKid, Doc (that’s short for Doctor). Doc likes to “dibble dabble” around fixing broken toys or even inventing her own. We learned about the letter D and practiced writing the upper and lower case letter. Also, with Doc, we introduced our first-word list. The class will have their first test on Friday, October 4th! I know they’ve been studying already at home as I’ve heard them discussing the flashcards and the word list with their friends.
In math, we finished up our colors, shapes, and growing pattern exercises and moved on to Chapter 3: Positions! I have focused on more visual clues for the kids so that they are able to see the actual position of an object, say a pencil, “under the table” or holding it “over” the table. They’ve caught on quickly and I’m so impressed by their hard work!
Science has been getting more in-depth with each lesson too. The entire class loves walking across campus to the lab. The past two weeks we’ve been focusing on apples. The class learned how important a bar graph is when taking data (how many of our classmates like red apples, how many like green, etc) to hands-on experiments such as trying to figure out if certain apples will float or sink in a bucket of water and using the balance scales to figure out how many gram bears an apple weighs (FYI: The biggest one in our barrel was 180 grams)! It’s always awesome to see those brilliant scientists minds at work too! Last Thursday, Ms. Kathie was kind enough to bring in her slow cooker so we made applesauce out of the apples everyone brought in! Each child helped by slicing the apples with a special tool! On Friday, we build structures out of apples with toothpicks! What a fun STEAM project! By the way, if you’re wondering which apple the kiddos liked the best, the yellow apples won the vote by a landslide!
In social studies, we’ve been learning about the explorer Christopher Columbus and his three ships, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. I talked about the use of an hourglass and how the sailors aboard Columbus’ ship used ones that were in 30-minute intervals. The sailors knew that when they had flipped the glass eight times, it was time for their shift to end. Pretty interesting! The kids were completely engrossed by this lesson and had some great follow up questions like, “How did they talk to the other sailors on the other boats?” “How did they go to the bathroom” “What happened to his diary?” and “What did they eat for two months?” We each made our own ships to conclude the lesson!
We didn’t have a VIP this week due to the short week, but last week’s VIP was Luke Brown! We enjoyed Luke’s All About Me board so much! Luke loves the color red, the park is his favorite place to be and when he grows up, he wants to be a firefighter! How cool is that? Luke also shared that he hopes for a sister with super powers! Thanks so much Luke for sharing so many fun facts about yourself, we really loved it!
Last weekend we celebrated Wood Acres 50th birthday on campus and it was such a great day celebrating our Constitution and our school! So glad to have seen some of you that were able to be there!
One very important reminder: WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 2ND IS PICTURE DAY!
And our word of the week is: Explorer
With love,
Ms. Porto and Ms. Kathie
