On Monday, we spent a little time in a mini-lab making a Glitter Jar! This special tool helps us understand what it looks like when we get all "shaken up" inside. As the glitter settles, we related it to our process in becoming calm. We talked about the time it takes to settle, and how even watching the jar do it can help us with the process too! We suggested taking breaths, wiggling our toes, finger folding, and light arm and shoulder squeezes to ourselves as strategies to "settle our glitter." The kids really wanted the directions, so if you'd like this tool...see below! We got all our supplies easily at Michaels, including a plastic jar rather than glass.Glitter Jar Instructions
In math, we compared pathways for a price comparison problem. Each group presented a poster with their solution and strategies, both visually and numerically represented. Our community of mathematicians listened with polite skepticism, asking questions to deepen their understanding and to challenge each other to think differently. We discovered that this problem connected to a wide variety of math topics - money, decimals, multiplication, division, and logical reasoning...to name just a few! We also compared various visual representations from our group posters and realized some important criteria for creating clear visual proofs of our thinking.
We also celebrated that our brains grow when we challenge ourselves and when we reflect on informative mistakes. We've used that mindset as we reviewed subtraction with regrouping and its connections to place value. We're also developing a habit of estimating first, solving, then comparing our solution to our estimate. That helps us to check for reasonable solutions. Next week we'll use these skills to solve some multi step subtraction story problems.
As scientists, we ended the week with a discussion about germs and how they spread. We asked a testable question about how handwashing time affects the amount of dirt left on hands. Brave volunteers covered their hands in water-soluble paint to model the dirt and germs that our hands gather through the day. We created a rating scale to fairly judge the amount of paint left on hands after 1 second of handwashing, 5 seconds, and so on. We'll finish collecting data next week, analyze our data table, and draw some conclusions.
In reading, we met Nya and Salva, Sudanese children from Linda Sue Park's novel, A Long Walk to Water. We've started to invest ourselves in understanding who they are and their experiences. It's wonderful to see them question, wonder, worry...and see history through another child's eyes. We talk daily about how this is so different that our life, but so very important to see.
The US Constitution had a birthday Monday (231 years old)! Reading Articles I, II, and III helped us understand how our government works. It's neat to see the aha! lights as we have just read the Declaration of Independence with its grievances against the king and that form of government. It makes sense that we set up our government so differently. We also learned that it took a lot of time (years) to write, and was crafted by compromise on delegates' part. We made that learning authentic: the students came up with proposals on how our class home work, termed "Cliff Notes," will roll out. Citizens talked together about the pros and cons of two choices Mrs. Forrest and Mrs. Mangels had come up with, but then realized there may be many other ways too. So they came up with compromises...proposals of different ways, and then we took a vote! More to come on that decision soon, but the kids LOVED that active role in deciding what is going to happen!
Writers continue to work towards understanding and writing accurate capitalization in ALL we do. They are building stamina for writing in their notebooks, and are learning to craft each sentence, word, or mark carefully!
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