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Each year we have some parent volunteers come into the classroom to teach the students about a particular artist. Back in my day we called them the "picture ladies." We call it AVIC. This year we had the lovely M & Ms come to teach us.  Our first artist was Norman Rockwell. We learned how Rockwell used realism to show everyday life. He worked for the Saturday Evening Post and the Boy Scouts. He created a beautiful series called the Freedoms. He even painted a Cubs game! The students brought in props to wear and then they illustrated each other as they would appear on the cover of the Post.
The next artist we studied was Leonardo DaVinci: the famous inventor, scientist, and artist. We watched a couple videos on his life and his most famous work, the Mona Lisa. We used little adjustable figures to create an action drawing.  First we played with Fibonacci and Sunflowers, then we played with Sierpinski and Candy Corn. We have been talking about patterns in math. The Fibonacci sequence is a pattern that takes the first two numbers and adds them 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,etc. We looked at how this shows up in nature. In sunflowers, in broccoli, in a leaf, in just about anything. We then talked about more patterns, especially that of Sierpinski's Triangle. We talked about math fractals and looked at different examples. Then...we built some using candy corn. The results were pretty impressive! Cool thinkers! Fall is a great time for some cool STEM pumpkin science! We took some time to look at some pumpkins a different way. The first experiment we did was measuring some pumpkins in an unusual way. We measured the height of pumpkins using non-standard methods. We used erasers, yarn, blocks, marbles, etc. to see how high the pumpkins were. We then recorded our information using the website, NextLesson. It was a great way to record our data using tech. Our next experiment was predicting and observing traits of pumpkins. We looked at the weight, circumference, price per pound, number of lines, number of seeds, and whether a pumpkin would float or not (it will!) Mr. Renardo lent us a welcome hand (thanks--you are awesome!)            Halloween turned out to be some nasty weather. We had a good amount of snow and cold temperatures. Yuck! Snow in October?!? We had to cancel the Halloween Costume Parade for the parents. Fortunately Mrs. Wright was able to have a smaller version inside.                        Happy Halloween everyone! Stay safe!    We are reading the story, Bat Loves the Night (one of my favs!) It's a non fiction story/fiction story that tells the adventures of a bat at night. It gives lots of facts about bats. We read about the nighttime adventures of a bat, we watched videos about bats' skeletal systems, we read about how bats can land upsidedown, and we made bat flyers. I think the kids favorite was the bat flyers. We first started the STEM activity with a regular copy of a bat. The kids practiced throwing these bats to get a good distance. We then added a paperclip for weight. Then I gave the kids a card stock copy of the bat. The students could choose which one they wanted to fly. They also had the choice of stance and flying procedure. It was fun to watch them work out how they wanted to do it. Congrats to our super scientists!  We made our traditional Math word wallets again this year. It's a fun way to study our Math vocab. We treat our knowledge like money. It's fun to earn! We often play a game of Headbanz, using our vocab, especially before a test or quiz. Our first unit in English is that of sentences. We learn that a sentence has a capital letter in the beginning, a subject and predicate in the middle, and ends with an ending mark. We did lots of activities: starting with simple sentences and moving up to compound and complex sentences.  One of our favorite activities was sorting Taco Bell sauce packets. Did you know that Taco Bell puts different sentences on the outside of their sauce packets? They have declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory sentences on them. We had a ball finding and sorting the different types.  We also sorted sentences other ways. We then moved on to making complete sentences. We had one half of the room make subjects and the other half of the room make predicates. We then put them together. The kids were in hysterics with the funny sentences we created. We then moved on to compound subjects and compound predicates. We had one half of the room make compound subjects and the other half of the room make compound predicates. We then put them together. Finally, we moved to compound and complex sentences.
 As a back-to-school activity we created Pencil Poems with all of our hopes and dreams and fears. They turned out excellent! |
Mrs. Pamela WandersenHello there! Archives
June 2020
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