Today, after our usual morning work time, we had a shortened morning meeting so that we could go up to the computer lab fort round number three of the MAP assessment – today was the first of two math parts of the test. When we finished with that, we went back down to our room to finish morning meeting and also have Leo read his Star of the Week poster. After that, we had Writer’s Workshop. Since time was limited this AM, we had a very short min-lesson, about adding details and “color” to writing, and then the kids went off to write.
After writing, we went down to the cafeteria for lunch and then out for recess. When we got back up to our room, we started a new Read Aloud book – another mystery (we can’t seem to get enough of the mysteries…) from the Cam Jansen series. Today it was Cam Jansen and the Mystery of the Stolen Diamonds. After 3 chapters, we headed on down to the gym for class with Mr. Hill and Mr. Peterson.
When we got back up to our room, we had Math Workshop. Today we began a new unit on shapes and geometry. A couple of the kids were wondering how we were doing math without numbers, and were amazed to discover that shapes are math. I think some of them were pretty relieved to find this out, truth be told. We worked on fitting smaller shapes into outlines, to build a sense of the properties of various shapes. Today we worked with hexagons, trapezoids, rhombuses (rhombi?), parallelograms, squares, and triangles.
After math, we had Science Lab. Last Friday the kids did an experiment in which they separated a cupful of river rocks (sand, gravel, and pebbles) using screens of various sizes. They devised their own method for separating out the three types of rocks. Today they used the same method that they discovered on Friday to separate out the rocks and then glued a sample of each onto a recording sheet.
After all of that, it was time to pack up and head home!
