Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Meet Rosie, the Newest Member or Our Class!

This week, we started our day by meeting, Rosie.  Rosie is a Chilean Rose or Rose-hair tarantula, Grammostola rose, donated to our class by the family of a former student, Samantha.  Samantha knew that in the past, I had two tarantulas as class pets.  When her great Uncle decided to reduce his collection, she suggested we might make good caretakers for one of his tarantulas.   I'm glad she thought of us!  Rosie is definitely an exciting addition to our classes.  Ask your child to tell you a little about what he/she learned about tarantulas today.  If you or your child would like to learn more about Rosie, check out this link on tarantulas.

 










In math, the students were introduced to the strategy: Use or make a picture or diagram. We had to read the clues carefully, but we were successful using the strategy.

 Next the students worked at their Exploratory centers.





Next, the students worked on our second Creative Problem Solving lesson.  This week, they were given 20 minutes to complete the "squiggle" below.
In this task, students are asked to create a single, cohesive picture that includes all of the given squiggle figures and lines.  This exercise focuses on the students' flexibility and elaboration.

Flexibility is the ability to change your way of thinking about a problem or situation.  It is the ability to think of alternative ideas and to adapt to different situations  
  • You are flexible in your thinking when you approach a complicated math problem you missed in a different way.
  • You are flexible in your thinking when you can think of indoor games to play when your birthday swim party is rained out.
Elaboration is the process of expanding an idea by adding detail.  To elaborate, you must understand the original idea and see a way to clarify or improve it by adding specific details.  
  • You are elaborating when you add to, enlarge, enrich, or expand descriptions, designs, drawings, explanations, instructions, reports or  stories. 
  • You are using elaboration when you edit your stories and add more descriptive vocabulary and more details.
We ended our day meeting our newest Quirkle scientist: Density Dan.
Ask your child to tell you about our experiment to see which solution has a greater density, fresh water or salt water?

Have a great week!


2 comments:

  1. Love the "newspaper articles".

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  2. Dear Ryan,

    Thank you for your comment. Our spinning paper slideshow is from photobucket.com I found the website link on our New Zealand Quadblogging partner's blog. I am learning as much as the kids from this wonderful partnership. :-)

    Thank you for taking your time to comment on our blogs. We really appreciate it!

    Mrs. Koch

    ReplyDelete