Growing Plants and Learning 4 Facts

This last week started off with something different as we went to see the Jr. High's play/musical rehearsal. They were performing Seussical Jr. a play with the story line of Horton Hears a Who but with other Dr. Seuss characters. The students became very excited about the play and I believe some of them went to see the actual performance on Wednesday night. As far as the classroom goes, the students started a new unit in science this week all about Plants. We started off discussing what the essential resources are that a plant needs to live and grow. These elements are air, water, sunlight and soil. We also talked about the parts of a plant and what they do to help bring in nutrients around the plant to allow them to grow. The students were very excited about this unit because they get to actually grow some different plants and observe them over the three week period. The students are doing an experiment to see whether beans will germinate the fastest in total sunlight, some sunlight, or no sunlight at all. They are also watching how Spider plants grow roots just by sitting in water. Next week the students will be planting more tiny seeds and observing how they sprout and grow.




For math this week, the students started learning about multiplying 4 facts. We discussed how you can find an answer in multiplication by simply knowing other multiplication facts. The students already knew 4x5=20 and 4x10= 40 so we used those equations as anchor numbers to help solve other facts. Most of the students caught on to the multiplying by 4 rather quickly and I am quite impressed at how well they were able to figure them out on their fact sheets. The students also learned about coordinate points and how to read and graph them on a grid. We worked in the positive quadrant 1 (see image below), so all the numbers were easy to understand. As a class we plotted some different pictures on the graphs as well as labeled the coordinates of other points. I am really amazed at how well the students understood this topic as it can be quite challenging and was brand new to them this week.

As for reading, we read the story Moses Goes to a Concert out of our reading books. The story was about a young deaf boy who loved to play the drums. One day he and his class went to a concert and were able to meet the percussionist there, a young woman whom also happened to be deaf. The percussionist inspired Moses to become a professional percussionist someday too. The students learned a lot of new music vocabulary and we discussed how percussion instruments are like drums, the piano, cymbals and xylophones. We talked about what sound vibrations must feel like and how Moses was able to hear even though he was deaf.

The students took the final exam for the Pilgrims and Thirteen Colonies unit this week so we are officially done with the main units in Social Studies! We also worked on finishing our persuasive writing paragraphs this week. The students did a wonderful job completing them and wrote their final drafts in their writer's notebook. The next genre we did this week was writing a compare and contrast paragraph to explain why things are the same or different. The students looked at pictures of ants and grasshoppers and we discussed how they were alike and different. The students came up with great examples such as they both have antenna and one lives underground or in hills while the other lives in grass and bushes. For the revising stage, the students did peer editing where they would switch their paragraphs with a partner. This time however, the students were allowed to use any of the colored revising marks.  Most students used pink (adjectives), orange (synonyms), and green (adverbs). Some students actually used purple and were able to add some really nice similes into their writing. I cannot tell you how amazed I am at the students' progress in writing. I can see them growing into more mature writers who love to create stories and are interested in the flow of a paragraph. To look at the Santa Letters they wrote when I first visited back in December to now is a huge difference in quality and skill. I cannot wait to see what the students have in store for one another next week as we begin writing pen pal letters to one another using these different genres of writing!

Have a wonderful weekend,
-Laura Hill