Week of 2/26

In grammar this week, the Girly Goats group focused on direct quotations.  They learned how to add correct punctuation to direct quotations that are located at the beginning, middle, and end of sentences.  This took some practice!  The class wrote short little conversations involving 2-3 characters at home.  In class, they worked together to make corrections to the punctuation, find run-on sentences, etc.  We also learned about indirect quotations.  To help solidify the lesson, they reworded some of the sentences from their stories as indirect quotations.  The concept of direct vs. indirect was a little tricky, and this helped tremendously! 

The Happy Horses spent the week working with contractions.  They learned how to form contractions, and also learned how to diagram “not” contractions.  They were pretty cracked up thinking of “n’t” as an adverb!  The group also worked in teams to create a series of review questions from all of the grammar cards that they have studied all year.  In the next couple weeks, we will be playing a review game in class that uses the questions that they wrote.  Study those cards at home, so we can have an excellent review game!  Of course, we have also been trucking along with spelling and vocabulary lists, as well.  I explained to the class that I am going to increase my pickiness in the last 10 weeks of the year!  Handwriting, punctuation, capitalization, EFFORT…. It all matters on every assignment!

In Art, Ms. Nancy led the class through a project that I absolutely loved!  Although it isn’t technically spring, it sure feels like it!  She had them create a horizon line, and a stormy, cloudy sky.  Then, they made ovals on the ground, which would be water puddles.  (They drew all of these lines in white crayon, which was a bit of a trick and required some serious concentration!)  The class then used rulers to create lines from the sky to the puddles.  Finally, they added water color to create a really awesome rain scene!

The Hobbit group is still making their way through the novel, but the One and Only Ivan group has wrapped up this literature unit!  They have been working on writing assignments that correlate with the book.  They worked on creating structured paragraphs, and they also did a little research with an animal habitat activity.  For the next few weeks, they will be focusing solely on writing!

In history, the class has been learning about the Civil War and the Underground Railroad this week.  They have been adding to their interactive notebooks, having exciting class discussions, and watching videos at home to support their in-class lessons.   

Science this week was an overview of what they have learned about the solar system and space.  The class worked in groups to create a graphic organizer to easily view the concepts from the unit. 

Then, we included some math in our lesson!  We talked about the size of the planets and the sun, and creates a scale representation so that we could compare the sizes.  On a large board, the kids created scale pictures of the planets using a ruler and compass.  They learned about the metric system (mm & cm), how to use a compass, and they really got a sense of how small Earth is compared to some of the other planets!  Finally, they were able to really get a feel for how massive our sun is compared to the planets.  At home, we will be watching a video that sums up our discussion from today.