Let's make an igloo!

Our completed igloos!

The paintbrushes came out again, this time to use with glue as we decorated containers with squares of fun foam to transform them into igloos! The finishing touch was a small arctic animal to live in it. The kids love doing hands-on projects that support the texts we read and the learning they are doing.

My hands are gluey!

Making rows of snow blocks

You'll like our igloos!

Paint those containers with glue!

All done and ready to go!

Now to survive the bus trip!

Excited to begin!

Three Arctic themed texts we read this week were Immi's Gift, Straight To The Pole, and Lars the Little Polar Bear. Themes of friendship and giving, adventures and helpfulness, and drama and imagination were discovered in the stories.

We love read-alouds!

We have a series on this character

 Morse code anyone? In science we learned how Morse code and the telegraph were invented. Then, armed with our alphabet of morse code dots and dashes, we deciphered some messages to read the mystery words. We also used flashlights to practice giving a morse code message with short on and off lights and longer light for dashes. We have wrapped up the communication technology unit and will begin Plants & Animals next week.

During writing this week, we created our own How-To books on subjects chosen by the kids, and we wrote a class How To Blow Up A Balloon Using baking Soda and Vinegar. The lab coat and crazy glasses were donned as I demonstrated the experiment - everyone was a little nervous in case too much vinegar was put in the water bottle. No worries - the balloon blew up very sedately with all the oohs and ahhs such 'magic' brings. They wrote the directions down and may want to try this at home once their collection of How-To writing goes home.

Science even carried over into recess. Here is a photo of two friends playing with their walkie talkies that they made with tinker toys at recess:

Over and out!

In math we are describing numbers in terms of tens and ones and this week practiced expanded notation. 54 has 5 tens and 4 ones and in expanded notation would be written 50 + 4 = 54. Learning the tens and ones place, differentiating between questions that ask how many tens vs. the value of the tens, and decomposing the number can be confusing, but we are using the base ten blocks and other manipulatives to visualize and make the numbers.

We wished Dom a very Happy Birthday this week - I am sure he will have a fun weekend playing with birthday gifts!

It's warm out - enjoy the weekend,
Mrs. Dagley