Winter Party 2016

What a great party today! Thank you to the awesome parents who provided us with such a great time.  Here are some photos from the event!  Hope you have a great winter break!

Evaluating a paragraph and Creating a Criterion Chart to help us move our writing forward!

      Students were asked to look at a paragraph that was written on the History of Duels. There are four versions of the paragraph. Click HERE if you want to preview the paragraphs.  Students had to identify the strengths of each paragraph and then put them in order from the least developed to the most developed.  

 Students then developed a progression of how we can move our informational paragraph from a "starting place" to a "on a roll" paragraph (their labels).  

Writing involves so much meta-cognition. We want to get a great idea down, spell well, have strong grammar, grab the reader, and teach the information. So much to remember! 

Civil War gallery walk

Getting ready for the Civil War Study in Social Studies.

Students do a "Gallery Walk" of images from the time period. This helps determine what students know about the time period before the unit.

I had to ask the student who wrote down that this image is of Matthew Brady how she knew it was him. She said it was in our picture books that we were previewing. Good attention to the author's notes!

Misconception identified here! This is not Harriet Tubman!

Winter Open House

We had a great Winter Open House. It was a day to celebrate and share our projects while allowing our families to get a peek of or day.

Learning about the gold rush

Our favorite volunteer led one of our social studies lesson this week on the gold rush.

Her husband's great-great grandfather had written a journal in the summer of 1852. Someone in the family had transcribed the journal many years ago. Students loved reading how the author documented his daily life. There were even a few love letters included to a young lady named Emily.

Students asked questions like, "What is ague?", "What is a cord?", "Did Emily ever come and visit him?".

Here is a photo of Mrs. F's husband's grandfather and his wife, the son and daughter-in-law of the author.

Flickerbill's Growth

Last week, we completed our investigation on why do we need algebraic expressions. 

Most students are able to find the pattern when the sequence is chronological. When the sequence skips values and jumps from 10 to 100 things begin to change. It is not ten times as much as the value for term 10. 

Here you can sort of see how some students were postulating that the value for term ten should have doubled what the value was for term five (they are highlighted yellow) but then quickly the student could see that actually that was not the case. 

So we tried using the comparison of terms 2, 4, and 6. You can see those highlighted in orange. The values are not increasing by doubling or tripling. 

After more discussion, and much encouragement to stop looking just at the column of the height and its numbers (the recursive pattern) but to look across the columns to the co-variant values. The age and height correspond in value to each other.

We truly felt accomplished after quite a few students were able to determine the algebraic expression!!! Lots of high-fives and Woot Woots were going on!

Not a lot of books at home? Don't forget the Columbia Public Library!

What is matter?

Students have started exploring "What is matter?" They started the investigation by thinking about the different ways that we define matter.

Then, they sorted picture cards into categories of Matter/Not Matter. Some pictures that students were unsure of were: sound, heat, light and air.

Next, students will use a variety of materials to test a question that will help them determine some of the properties of matter.

In each "tub" they are testing light, air, sand, stones, and water.

Each tub has a different question, such as, "Can you pour it?" or "Does it have mass?"

It has been amazing to see students refine their thinking after only three days of this first learning cycle.

Thank you to Dr. Debi Hanuscin and the MU QuEST program that helped provide training, materials, and lessons to develop this unit on matter!

Want to learn more about this exciting program? Click Here to find out more!