It's hard to believe we're already at Spring Break - this year will be over before we know it! These past few weeks have been full of so much learning, and I am continually impressed by my students' incredible inquires into the world around us. While learning about the upcoming solar eclipse, we got to experiment with gravity, inertia, and how planets orbit in space - all entirely prompted by the students' own wonders! What an amazing thing as an educator to be able to stand back and watch your students take charge of their own learning. I am truly lucky! In math, we've been working hard on our 3D shapes. Students had the opportunity to take this learning into the kinesthetic space by building some 3D shapes using marshmallows and toothpicks! We created cubes, rectangular prisms, and pyramids. We also discussed why some of our round shapes wouldn't work very well for our toothpick activity. Nothing like some fun fine motor practice to bring some novelty into our math lessons! Reading has also seen more hands-on activities as of late, including a CVC word building center. At this station, students use the letter tiles to sound out and build the CVC word. The best part? The tiles and board are magnetic! Writing has also been a big part of our daily routine. Recently, we've been working on our color words. Students had the opportunity to write a sentence using the color word and an item of their choice, such as a crayon, flower, or cupcake. These picture cards will be used after spring break as a color sorting activity to help reinforce the color words that we worked so hard to learn! A big thank you to everyone that came out to our Intercultural Fair! There were so many different countries and cultures represented, and it was great to see the students' hard work on display. Our most exciting inquires, however, had to do with the upcoming solar eclipse. First, we watched a video explaining what the eclipse is and how it works. Then, we used our globe, a flashlight, and a ball to simulate the eclipse as a group. Students had so many great wonders during this portion of our lesson: Why doesn't it cover the whole earth? Could it just cover a part of it? These inquiries led into a whole host of other questions regarding the planets and how they orbit the sun. We talked about how the earth is spinning and orbiting the sun at the same time, which is why sometimes the moon passes in front of it. Then, the students began to wonder about the spinning: if the earth was really spinning, and we're on the earth, why don't we feel it? Some students even connected this idea to being in a car or on a bike, and how when the car or bike turns, we can feel it. This prompted the discovery of two new vocabulary words: gravity and inertia. I made sure to point out how smart they were for already discovering these incredible science words! Gravity became of particular interest, as students began to wonder why we weren't flattened to the ground like pancakes all the time. Could there be another type of gravity, one pulling us up instead of down? After all of this, we decided to take some action. Students set up four centers: one for exploring the eclipse, one for simulating an orbit, one for figuring out how gravity worked, and one for researching about the eclipse. Everyone rotated through our stations, and it was such fun to see the learning take place! We've clearly sparked an interested in outer space, so I hope to explore that further during our Genius Hour time after spring break. We're coming down the home stretch - everyone enjoy your time off, and I'll see you soon!
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May 2024
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