Welcome Back to School!

Dear Boys and Girls,

I shared a podcast about my summer on the Primary Thinkers home page.
How was your summer?  Did you go anywhere special?  What was the best thing about this summer?

I hope a few of you will post a comment about your summer.

I am looking forward to seeing you all soon!

Love,
Mrs. Koch

P.S.  Remember, only sign your comments with your first name and never share any specific personal information about yourself, your family or any of your classmates.  You should have your parents look over your comment before publishing it.  Also, keep in mind your quality commenting skills or watch the video to refresh your memory:

Mrs. Yollis' video,  How to Compose a Quality Comment,  http://vimeo.com/15695021

Welcome Back from Spring Break

Today was the first day of fourth quarter.  Be sure and check your child's Take Home Folder for his or her progress report.  They should be very proud of their accomplishments!

We started our day working in our Exploratory centers.  Several students finished their center and were able to choose a new one today.  Ask your child about their current center and task.

After reflecting on last week's Canadian folktale, Tuk the Hunter, the students completed our Waste Not, Want Not book.  They worked in pairs to think creatively and brainstorm ways to reuse and recycle household trash items.  

As they generated ideas, they typed them into our Power Point presentation.  I think  their ideas were terrific, but I was most impressed by how well they collaborated with their partner. 

In the afternoon, the students were introduced to our newest Quirkle, Pressure Pete.

In our experiment the students learned that air moves from an area of high pressure to an area of low pressure.  They brought a straw home to demonstrate our experiment.  Ask your child to share their science log with you.

Next, the students worked on their math problem solving skills in the TOPS Math and Math Rules programs.

The students ended the day with their Spanish lesson with Senora Gates.

Have a great weekend!

D Day Was Hot, Smokin' Hot!

"Oh My!" you say.  "A fire in the school????"

Yep, well sort of....

Our day started with some sparks....  Sparks of creativity that is....

The students were given a paper with a few squiggly lines and shapes.  Their task was to create a cohesive picture incorporating all of the lines and shapes.  They could rotate their paper as much as they wished in order to find the desired orientation.  Squiggles are more than just a cute art project.  These tasks exercise and strengthen the students' creative problem solving skills: fluency, flexibility, originality and elaboration.

I encourage the students to think of many possible pictures and then see if they can choose a theme for their picture that is original within our class.  They have to be very flexible in their thinking to incorporate all of the given lines and shapes.  Once their picture begins to take shape, they must pay attention to detail and be as elaborative as possible.  (These same skills can be used when they are writing a creative story or solving a real world problem.)  The more they strengthen these skills, the more creative they will be.  Today we had an outer space scene, a view of the inside of a baby's nursery, an alien attack scene and several others.  ask your child to share their own squiggle with you.  Have them tell you what they did well, what was easy and what was challenging about this project.

Once I had their brains smoldering and sparking from our creative workout, I added in a little oxygen to achieve a flame, Ollie Oxygen, that is....

Ollie Oxygen is our latest Quirkle and today we learned that fire needs oxygen to burn.  

After reading our picture book and listing our new vocabulary words,  we conducted our experiment.  The students wrote a hypothesis for our problem:  Which candle will go out first when we limit the oxygen supply of each? In our experiment, I lit three small candles.  I carefully covered each with a glass container of varying size.  The students recorded their observations and wrote our class conclusion.  Ask your child to share their science log with you.

After lunch and recess, we headed off to our next destination.  This adventure kept us on the continent of North America.  The students and I traveled far to the north, to the home of the Inuit people: Canada.  In our folktale, Tuk the Hunter,  we discovered some of the dangers faced by the Inuit people as they hunt to provide for their family.  

We also learned the Inuit do not waste any part of the animals they hunt.  For our project, the students are making a class book, Waste Not, Want Not.   This week they brainstormed ways we can reuse and recycle trash items.  Next week, we will work to finish our book.

The students ended their day with a little Spanish number/color BINGO with Senora Gates.  What a fun way to practice your Spanish vocabulary!

It was a busy day and their enthusiasm spread like fire, but in the end, the only smokey smells in our room came from our little candles.

Have a great week!

Where We've Been & What We've Been Up To...

What is it Mark Twain said?  "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated"-- or something to that effect.  Anyway, sorry for my blogging silence, I have been busy raising my teenagers.  LOL 

The Reader's Digest (not quite) Condensed version of the past few weeks....  

The Quirkles:

Mary Motion
The students  learned that an object will stay at rest unless force is applied (Newton’s First Law of Motion).

Nosey Nina

The students learned the our senses work together to send messages to the brain.

In our World Travels, we visited Russia and read the folktale, The Clever Maiden.

In our story, the the czar gave the clever maiden and her father several riddles to solve.  The students used their own creativity and wit to write their own riddles.  We are anxious to share these with you at our spring Open House!

Our next stop took us to India where we read the story, The Drum.  

 

It was a wonderful chain story that tells how a boy gets a drum he has always wanted, by chance, while he participates in a series of kind acts.  Along the way, someone gave him chapati, Indian flat bread.  So we decided our project for this story was to make and taste chapati ourselves.  

Our most recent adventure took us to the continent of Africa and the country of Ghana where we were inspired by the folktale Why Hare is Always on the Run.  We enjoyed learning a little about the African culture and their masquerade.  We learned about their animal masks, traditional dances and story telling performance.  In a masquerade, the dancers are usually men.  The masks and costumes are inspired by animals and ancestors  that possessed character traits and/or skills desired by the dancer.  

The students discussed and then listed their own character traits, talents and skills.  Next, they chose an animal they felt represented these traits and skills.   The students drew out the design for their own African-styled masks.  They are in the process of making their mask in ceramic clay.  I will fire them after spring break.  In the weeks ahead, they will finish their mask so it can be displayed at our Open House.

In the computer lab, the students continued learning to use Storybird.  They have written some great stories! This is one that Zachary finished.  

Anything That Happens on Storybird

Encourage your child to continue to explore their creativity and ideas through writing.  Have them login to their Storybird account and share their stories with you.  Digital storytelling is a great motivator!

Over the past two weeks, I have introduced the students to another digital storytelling site, Kerpoof.  This free site is a Disney created website where students can make pictures, storybooks and even animated videos.  It is very user friendly, engaging and inspires creativity in children as they tell their stories.  Turn your child loose on this site and they will use their imagination and writing skills to create original stories, pictures, animated movies and other creative projects.  This week, the students were given an account under my teacher account.  They know their user login and their password.  The D Day students need to also remember their Class Account Code: W264.

This week, watch for our latest (much shorter LOL) blog update!

World Travelers

So, I guess I should have sent all the permission slip forms home, but it was a oversight on my part.  I just couldn't pass up the field trip opportunity...  Today, the D Day SAGE students joined Ms. Webb and I on a  trip to Argentina.  I took care of arranging the necessary passport paper work and we were off.  Since our time was brief, we had to make it a very quick trip.  The students made notes on our trip...

This picture was taken on our arrival in Argentina.  We even got our passport stamped!  We were pretty tired at this point, but geared up for our learning adventure as our day wore on!  We learned they speak Spanish here.  It is a good thing Senora Gates has been teaching us some basic vocabulary.  We were able to ask for a drink of water and where the restrooms were located.  We were pretty limited beyond that--  there wasn't time to do much shopping so we didn't get a chance to practice our number and color words.  

Argentina is a pretty amazing place.  The land is very different depending on where you are at in the country.  There are high mountains on the west side and ocean beaches on the east side.  A few of us decided to climb Cerro Torre in the Southern Patagonian Ice Field.  (Dear Abby's Dad, Thanks for keeping me on my toes!)  (Mia, our newest classmate, was wishing she remembered her coat.  She said it was even colder here than on Briarcliff's windy playground!)

Another group of us headed to the southern part of the country to the pampas (grasslands).  We found emperor penguins!  Wow!  They were almost as tall as us!  (Mrs. Koch said we had to stay back so we didn't get pecked-- especially since she didn't have the permission slips!  She was being overly cautious.)

The rest of us went to see the gauchos.  That is what they call cowboys in Argentina.  We thought for sure we would get to ride horses.  Mrs. Koch vetoed that too!  :-(


We grabbed a quick steak and headed home.  (Did you know the people in Argentina eat beef almost every day.  They have a lot of farms and ranches there.)


On the bus ride home, Mrs. Koch read us a folktale from Argentina: The Gentle People.  It was a really neat story about the beautiful land, the gentle, kind people and what they did when their way of life was threatened.  In the story, every month right before the full moon, the Gentle People were granted one wish.  They always used it to make the world a better place.  We talked about what we might wish to make our world a better place.  Then we each wrote down our own wish.  Remind your child to tell you about his or her wish.  We slept the rest of the way home, so we wouldn't be too tired to do our work when we got back to school.


Once we were back at Briarcliff, we planted some wild flower seeds-- just like the flowers in the folktale!   We are hoping they will grow well in our classroom window.  We thought Mrs. Koch would let us rest, but oh no, she had lots of work for us!  We did have a good time on our trip to Argentina, you will have to ask us what all we learned!  We are hoping Mrs. Koch will take us somewhere cool next week too.  She said, "You never know...."

The boys and girls only whined for a little while about being tired.  We took a quick recess break and went back to work.  We found a little free time available in the library.  We used it to practice our Power Point skills and to begin a travel journal on the computers.  We are going to add some of the field trip pictures so we can share them with you at our spring Open House.  Today we practice/learned to open and save a new presentation.  We added a title to our travel journal and learned to format the font for color.  Lastly, we added a rectangle that filled the page, colored it and learned to send it behind our text.

 

We did just a little TOPS Math or Math Rules to practice our mathematical problem solving skills.  Then we were back on the computers in the Computer Lab.   

The students were introduced to a new, web based, digital storytelling application, Storybird.   Storybird uses a broad selection of art work to inspire you to write a story.  Each child was assigned a username and password today.  One of the great things about this application is students are able to continue their work from home, at their home school or here in SAGE.  All they have to do is login to the website.  They can even collaborate on a book with their classmates.  Another great feature of the site is you have the ability to print copies of your child's story (at no charge) on your home printer, share their stories through email, embed them in websites or blogs and even order hard or paperback copies of your child's book. 

The students spent some time exploring the available art work.  When they found an artist's work that inspired a story idea, they began creating their book.  Have your child login and share their story with you. 

We ended our day with our Spanish lesson with Senora Gates.

Now, they are tired!  I'm sure they will all be sleeping well tonight (and hopefully no one suffers from bus-lag.  LOL)

Have a great week!  Your kids are lots of fun!