We continued our study of forces and motion this week with a new set of catapult experiments. Students worked through the steps of the scientific method to determine whether a cotton ball or a ping pong ball would travel farther when launched from a catapult. The class first participated in a "fish bowl" where volunteers came into the center to use the given supplies to design a catapult. After watching the volunteers, partners split off to either mimic or recreate their own designs. Once each team had their catapults constructed, they did several trials and recorded their results. They had some great ideas about why the ping pong ball seemed to go farther most of the time. It was great to see them apply what they have learned about forces and motion. Later in the week, they had some fun redesigning their catapults and trying to hit a bulls-eye target on the board!
In math this week, students practiced regrouping with subtraction in both the tens and hundreds place. We will continue to work on subtraction skills next week with lessons 7-9. We also added STEM bins to our math centers this week. Each week the kids will have a different engineering challenge. This week, they were tasked to build a house using the STEM bin material of their choice. Materials included Legos, toothpicks and Play-Doh, base ten blocks, index cards and tape, and more. Each child's house looked unique, and the students were very creative in their thinking.
Our study of characters in reading this week focused on characters' feelings and how those feelings can change frequently throughout a story. The children also are practicing reading with more expression when they read dialogue in order to convey the emotions of each character. They learned that authors use many other words than "said" to help us know how a character should sound as they are speaking.
Many students are getting close to finishing up their first round of informational books. Students worked on writing conclusions and added "About the Author" pages to the ends of their books. Writing partners worked to help each other peer edit their work.
The students had a lot of fun during their Device Day class reward!
In science, the students are continuing to practice their science lab writing skills by doing a variety of ramp experiments. Groups were responsible for writing a testable question, a hypothesis, procedures, results, and a conclusion. The children also did sketches to go along with their writing. This week we learned about variables. Each group chose one variable to change from our original ramp experiment in an effort to get their toy car to travel the farthest possible. Some variables that were changed were the ramp material, height of the ramp, and the size of the car. Students did a nice job of working together collaboratively!
We have started Chapter 7 in math, which focuses on subtracting three-digit numbers with regrouping. This week we will cover lessons 3-5.
The students are continuing their study of characters in reading. They have learned to observe how characters treat other characters in the stories to learn more about their personality traits. Students also did "stop and jots" about what motivates their characters and how they respond to problems. Finally, we took a look at different ways writers use dialogue in stories to let us know which characters are talking.
In writing, the children are continuing to work on their informational books. They completed their introductions and are now working on writing the body of their books in order to teach about their subtopics. Students are adding quick sketches to their drafts that use text features like captions and labels to teach more about their topics.
