Ask Me About Friday, March 10, 2017

Thank-you for all the birthday wishes and cards.  It made my day so special!  We spent time today writing about our favorite birthday party that we can remember. They really enjoyed talking with a partner about this topic, then got right to work writing and drawing.  I'm seeing more consistent use of punctuation by many of the students.  They are doing a great job with spelling word wall words correctly, and they are stretching out the words they don't know how to spell.  They are using more lower case letters too.  We will continue to work on having those skills become more consistent and fluent.  
In math today, I challenged the class to think of ways to cute a cube into four equal parts.  We used modelling clay to try it, and although the pieces squished a little, it was clear to see they were essentially equal.  We thought of four ways easily.  One child was explaining a fifth way but may not have been able to explain it so I could understand what they meant.  I meant for this to be a warm-up to the problem, thinking they might only thing of a couple ways, but they really impressed me with how they were able to visualize and explain their ideas.
We also reviewed solid shapes.  I gave clues by telling how many faces, what shape the faces were, how many edges and vertices the shapes had, and whether they could roll, slide or do both.  There is still some confusion for a few children between plane shapes and solid shapes, but we will continue to review this in class. We talked about cylinders, cubes, cones, spheres, rectangular prisms, triangular prisms and pyramids.  Yesterday we played a game in small groups where children had to reach into a bag and describe the solid shape using math words.  They love this game and it's great practice using the vocabulary.  These kids are smart cookies!

Have a nice weekend!
​Miss Wolfe