Synthesizing Grandfather Twilight

We have been noticing how our thinking changes throughout a book as we read.  We usually have a deeper understanding by the time the book is done.  This happened as we read Each Kindness...

This especially happened as we read The Other Side.  We noticed that our schema about the Civil Rights Movement was important in our deep thinking about this book.

We noticed how repeated rereading of the book The Stranger helped us develop new and deeper ideas.

  We really paid attention to how our thinking changes during our first reading of Grandfather Twilight and we stopped to record our thinking at different points in the book.

We are deep thinkers in Room 408!

Going Public with our Space Inquiry

After finishing our big curricular inquiry about Earth & Space Systems & Cycles, we shared our new learning with our parents and other classes in our school.  We were proud of all our hard work.  Here are videos of our "going public" presentations.

The Mars Exploration Group

The Stars & Space Junk Group

The Moon & Astronauts Group

The Outer Planets & Dwarf Planets Group

What a great job, Room 408!

Building a Log Cabin

We are in the middle of our read aloud chapter book, Little House on the Prairie.

We have had a lot of discussion about the Ingalls family went out west and what happened to the native americans as white settlers started taking over the land.  We recently got to the part where Pa builds their log cabin with his own two hands.

We got out the Lincoln Logs and built some log cabins of our own.

This was a great opportunity to introduce them to Dick Proeneke.  I shared the story of his life and his dream of living off the land in the Alaskan wildnerness.  He built his cabin from scratch using nothing but hand tools, just like Pa!

The DVD called Alone in the Wilderness shows us how he did this, so we can imagine how hard Pa worked just like Dick Proeneke.

If you want to learn more about Dick Proeneke, click here and here.  

As we watched the DVD, we learned that he was a writer (he kept a journal of his adventures) as well as a mathematician (he used lots of math in building his cabin).

Here are some highlights from the DVD.

What intringues you about the life of Dick Proeneke?

Uncle Wolf Leaves Us Cookies...and a Math Investigation

On the 100th Day of School we 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 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.

Luckily we found out that Uncle Wolf didn't leave us the cookies...Ariah's grandma and grandpa did!

Celebrating the 100th Day of School

The 100th Day of school is always an exciting one.  Today we enjoyed lots of fun stations in which we worked with the number 100.
Making the decision was the difficult part!

We tried to fit 100 drops of water on a penny...

We made designs with 100 pattern blocks...

We grouped and counted 100 objects...

We did a graph containing 100 items...

We stacked towers that contained 100 items...

We made 100 Day glasses...

We flipped a coin 100 times and tallied heads or tails...

We made trains of 100 unifix cubes...

We stayed silent for 100 seconds...

We did 100 jumping jacks...

We did 100 math problems...

...and much more!  We loved celebrating the 100th Day of School!

LEADS Friendship Day

We had a great time at our yearly Friendship Day celebration in mid-February.  LEADS students had a day of creativity and fun while spending time with friends across all grade levels from 4-year-old Kindergarten up through 2nd grade. Students spent time in the craft room, the game room, the building rooms and munched on a special snack, all while spending time with LEADS friends.

Happy Friendship Day!