Silent 'e'

We have been noticing that many words have a silent 'e' at the end.  Our spelling focus this week was noticing and using the silent 'e' if we heard a long vowel, like in the word wall words 'like', 'came', 'make', and 'here.'
These are some fun videos that we like about silent 'e'.

Friendship Day

For our Friendship Day celebration, we found out that we would get to work with 4K to create something for our Friendship mural.

We had a project time with 4K to create "friends." We *loved* being the big kids and helping 4K with this project.

It was challenging to try and get all four of our LEADS classes together for a Friendship Day celebration, so we had a quick gathering in the Community Room and then we all contributed projects to a Friendship mural.

Second graders taught us about what a good friend does through a song.

Here is a video of our Friendship Day activities!


Here is our finished Friendship Mural!

100th Day

We had so much fun on our 100th day of school!  We chose from lots of stations:

Some of the favorite stations were trying to fit 100 drops of water on a penny, seeing if they can get to the middle of a tootsie pop in 100 licks, and making 100 day glasses.
Here is a video of all the fun we had!


On the 100th Day of school we also read the book Wolf's Chicken Stew by Keiko Kasza.

The book is about a wolf who has a plan to fatten up a chicken for his dinner.  He leaves food on her doorstep to fatten her up--100 pancakes, a cake weighing 100 pounds, 100 doughnuts--but eventually he is found out and joins the chicken and her 100 hungry little chicks for dinner.  On the last page the wolf contemplates leaving 100 scrumptious cookies on their doorstep.

That afternoon we heard a knock on our door and look what we found!

We even got a note from Uncle Wolf!

We ended up having  a great afternoon trying to figure out how many cookies there really were and how many cookies each of us would get if there was really 100 cookies.  We figured out that there were ten plates of ten cookies, which really was 100!

 We also figured out that we could have 20 plates of five cookies. We were excited to get so many cookies!

Those cookies were SCRUMPTIOUS!!!

Luckily we found out that Uncle Wolf didn't leave us the cookies...Jolene's mom made them! Thank you!

Van Gogh

Room 408 did a mini-inquiry and studied art by the painter Van Gogh.

We learned that he was troubled and often his paintings reflected his moods.  Later in his life, he started painting with bright colors.  He makes the viewer feel like they are in the painting.  In the painting below, he made the sun look so bright it actually made us feel like we should put on sunglasses!

We studied a variety of his paintings and shared what we noticed.

One of the best paintings he ever did was called The Starry Night.  He likely painted this when he was really happy: 

The first graders shared what the painting meant to us.  They noticed the stars and moon in the sky, as well as the tree.  They also commented on how the sky looked like it was moving and it gave them a feeling of calm.

I had found a cool optical illusion for them to try so that they could see the movement in the painting.  I hope you'll try it by clicking on the one of the following links:

optical illusion

or click on the video below:

We worked with some Van Gogh apps, read some bibliographies, and researched his life on BrainPop, Jr.

We shared a lot of learning about Van Gogh!  We coalesced our learning as we shared it by sorting it into categories as soon as we talked about it.

After reading about Van Gogh's life and investigating The Starry Night, we created our own interpretations of The Starry Night.

A few days later we added the dark parts to the foreground of our paintings.

You'll have to come to the LEADS Exploration Celebration to see our finished Starry Night artwork!

 One of the highlights of our inquiry was seeing The Starry Night in dominoes:

Ball Lightning

We have been enjoying the Little House series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and are reading On The Banks of Plum Creek.

We were interested in the chapter where there was a blizzard going on and balls of fire came rolling down the stovepipe.  We googled it to better understand what caused these "balls of fire" and came across this video:

We also found the following from the website: http://www.liwfrontiergirl.com/ballfire.html

Laura described seeing three "balls of fire" while living in their farmhouse near Walnut Grove, Minnesota. (On the Banks of Plum Creek) What Laura was describing is what scientists today call "ball lightning". Nobody knows exactly what they are but there have been many sightings, mostly during thunderstorms. Laura did not say that there was thunder, but ball lightning has been seen without it.

Ball lightning is normally described as being a ball shape, around 0.1 - 0.2m (4 -8 inches) in diameter. Laura's description of "bigger than Ma's big ball of yarn" is consistent with this.

Ball lightnings generally last less than 5 seconds. Laura's account suggests a time of not much more than this.

Ball lightning sometimes is accompanied by a hissing or crackling sound and also sometimes a sulphurous smell. However, Laura neither mentioned a sound nor a smell.

Ball lightnings are often reported to be attracted to metallic objects such as wire fences or telephone lines and they often enter houses through chimneys. When attached to metallic objects, they generally move along those objects. Laura's ball lightnings came into the house through the metal stovepipe and were attracted to Ma's knitting needles.

Ball lightnings decay in one of two ways, either silently or with a bang. Laura's ball lightnings disappeared silently.

Some ball lightnings seem to burn objects but like others that have been reported, Laura's ball lightnings did not.


We learn something new every day!

Culture Fair

Each year Hillcrest & LEADS celebrate the great variety of cultures in our world. Each classroom chooses a culture to study and shares with the whole school.
This was our day to share our Africa research, as well as find out about other cultures.
Here is a video showing our learning in the Culture Museum!

January Learning Mural

It's time to reflect on our January learning!

We are getting really good at collaboration as we work on projects together!

Here is our finished Learning Mural: