February is Here!

This week, our schedule was a bit jumbled due to 4th Grade Benchmarks. In true SBLC fashion, however, we were all flexible and worked hard to squeeze every moment in. Second Grade began their new section, "Sister," in Billy Miller. We hustled through spelling and writing centers as well! Third Grade read a few chapters farther in Rain Reign, and have been fast proving that Rose's struggle is maturing, and she's growing in that area each day. Fourth Grade worked tirelessly this week! They took the opportunity to show what they know in writing and did a great job on the Benchmarks. I know we are all looking forward to getting back to normal next week though!

We began our Force & Motion unit in science. We started out with week with a scavenger hunt to identify the numerous pushing and pulling forces around our school. We have some pretty observant scientists!

After our initial introduction, we spent the rest of the week exploring, defining, and investigating force. We discovered that magnets produce pushing and pulling forces with a fun pencil experiment.

We deepened our understanding of friction's force by creating our pulley system. Being the scientists that we are, we made predictions first: how many marbles would it take to raise a cup with 25mL of water?

We tried lifting the water twice, once without a pulley and once with.

Our pulley allowed for us to lift the water using almost half as many marbles. Take that, friction!

In math the fourth graders are still working with fractions. They wrote fractions as an equivalent fraction in simplest form. We did this by finding the common factors and dividing. We also highlighted all the prime numbers on a 100's chart. Third graders learned addition and subtraction strategies. We also talked about number patterns and tesselations. We made our own cool tesselations. Second graders practiced adding and subtracting 100 more or less. We also practiced problem solving with addition and subtraction.