Energy

What do these things have in common?

What do you know about energy already?

What is energy? What are the forms/types of energy?

We started our new Unit of Inquiry:

An inquiry into

How the world works

An inquiry into the natural world and its laws; the interaction between the natural world (physical and biological) and human societies; how humans use their understanding of scientific principles; the impact of scientific and technological advances on society and on the environment.

Energy

Central Idea:

Energy can be converted, transformed and used to support human progress

 Lines of inquiry:

·      Forms of energy

·      The storage and transformation of energy

·      How energy is used

·      Investigating and scientific process

Learning about characters

This book has two amazing characters, so I keep coming back to it each year, when we learn how readers pay attention to characters. On two days during the snack time I read it out loud to the students.

Here is what readers pay attention to when thinking about a character in order to understand the story:

We love the doubles!

This week we learn different strategies that help us to remember multiplication facts.

We use patterns and connections whenever possible.

Last Friday we looked at multiplying with one and zero:

This week we started with doubles. If you know doubles, you know many more facts.

Yesterday we built towers of 2-s, 4-s and 8-s

 two times three is double three- double three is six
four times three is double that - double six is twelve
eight times thee is double of four times three - double twelve is twenty-four

Anything two times means to double the number

Anything four times means to double the double 

Today we used the same double to connect to three times facts

3X6, 

Think: double six is twelve, six more is eighteen

If you know your doubles and three times table, you can use it to find six times a number, because six is double three.

Three times six is eighteen, double eighteen is thirty-six

We can't go without fun in a lesson, so we finished the lesson with a game:

Roll two dice and show thier product as an area model. Fill as much of the gameboard as you can. 

The one who covers more area is the winner.

Celebrate this week!

We have started a new tradition on Fridays. In addition to sharing what positive learning, attitude and actions the students have noticed about each other during the week, we celebrate the small and big positive accomplishments and joys of the week.

This week we celebrate:

• sharing our dance video during the PYP assembly
• finishing several illustrations for our picture books
• completing daily math practice
• doing some challenging multi-digit addition and subtraction problems
• learning a bit more multiplication
• Literature Circles because we love reading
• note-taking for sports writing

I hope that you find time this weekend to celebrate the small and big things that have made you grateful and brought joy to your family.

Beauty and patterns of multiplication

Take a look at this Stephen Von Worley's animated visualization of numbers.

Factorization on higher level is not third grade math, but the beauty and patterns of this animation made a perfect hook for a math lesson inquiring into patterns, models and vocabulary of multiplication. It also allows extension into primes and composites for students ready for challenges.

I showed the animation from my I-Pad. "Look" and "Wow" and "Cool" cheered with bright eyes made me smile. After watching numbers all the way to 300 (the animation seems to continue forever) the students worked in groups with different numbers to design their own patterns, realizing that some numbers can be arranged only in one way and some others in more than one way.

Can you guess what numbers are represented?

FMF

FMF (Five Minute Friday) is part of our weekly writing routine. It is a quick writing exercise, a focused writing in response to one word. It can be viewed as an experiment to see what happens when you just write. Since there is no expectation for a perfect outcome, it lowers the fear of writing and allows just write. "Just write" is what writers sometimes have to do. 

This week's word was "WIN"

Here are some ideas that surfaced within the five minute writing period. Each idea has potential to grow into a bigger writing.

Example 1
I am a winner because I like to win.
Things that I have won

• partner dancing 3rd place in reception
• egg catching 1st place at a birthday
• egg spoon race
• first one on a computer ME vs Sister at home
• slowest against my grandpa
• scream the loudest against my best friend

Example 2
In PE my team won "Not in My Back Yard" two times in a row and the other team won it once. My team won dodge ball twice.

I like to win but I am not always happy about it because it will make the looser team sad.

Example 3
I wonder what would happen if you were best in everything.
Well, this is what I think:
You will have many shelves of troffees and when you are moving, you will need many boxes and even have to carry some in your bag.

Responding to a read aloud

We continued with finding different ways to respond to reading. This time the students responded with a graffiti board and recorded any thought or images that came to their mind after listening to this story:

words and pictures

mostly pictures

mostly words

Hurray! We danced. We shared. We reflected on the learning.

The cleaning lady will laeve soon

The mannequins have become alive

They become more energetic with each move

They are having a party

Here are just few clips from the music video "A Night in a Shop" that we presented on Wednesday.I know that both the students and you would have liked to see a live performance, but with one dancer missing it was fair to show the video.

From the reactions of the audience we could tell that they enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed creating it.

On Thursday and Friday the students wrote their reflections for the unit "Let's Dance." These will be in their portfolios.

Today is the day...

..when we share our dance video with our lower school community during the PYP assembly.

The students have come up with a short introduction to share what we learned during this unit.

I have allowed them to decide what to say or do. 

Concepts and memorizing facts

I know that many students in the class already know multiplication facts. Knowing the facts is important and useful. Knowing the concepts is vital for further learning.

This Monday I asked the students to model what multiplication means. We have modeled addition and subtraction earlier. I asked them to use colored pencils to draw models of what they know.

Majority of the papers looked colorful like this:

There is clear evidence of knowing multiplication facts. These however are not models.

The next math lesson I modeled various multiplication problems. The students had to find what each model represented and figure out what types of models ( not materials) there were.

After this lesson the students began creating pictures like these:

Knowing these different models and meaning of multiplication will help the students later when they learn multiplication of larger numbers or division.

This and that in writing

Right now I am:

:: writing this blog post to inform you of what we do in class::

:: sitting on a blue couch::

:: letting my tea cool::

:: thinking of what else I should I write::

:: waiting for the students to return and the PYP assembly to start::

:: hoping that everything will go fine::

The writing above is an example of another writing prompt the students ( or adults) can use when they don't know what to write about or when they are in a hurry.

In addition to quick write in the journals, the students have created their picture book layouts and have continued illustrating their fictional narratives,  they have collected notes for their sport writing, some students have written blog posts. While they have been working, I have invited individual students to assist  them in revising their stories. 

Writing about reading

We like to talk about the stories we read. Spoken words disappear. We could record them, but the you need a tool  for listening. How could we record our thinking so it would be visible in a journal or in a classroom?

This week we are looking at different ways to present our thinking.

For a whole class work I purposefully use picture books. We can read the story in a shorter amount of time, they are more accessible to English language learners, and we can focus on comprehension and strategy practice.

I read:

Then students reread the text, highlighting what they thought was important or made them react and think.

Today students worked alone or with a partners to create a summary, a time-line, character comparison and thought bubbles with visuals.

Listening to beautiful language and talking about interesting stories

On busy days it may be difficult to keep to the routine of reading out loud, but we have managed. I may not have had time to read several pages from a chapter book, but it is possible to slip some poems into small pockets of time.

This book hosts a collection of poems about words, poems and books:

This book is filled with poems of apology:

This book has a wonderful combination of illustrations and poems with a twist:

In addition to the read aloud and some individual reading, we had two Literature Circle meetings. One of the groups is reading the Lightening Thief. This is a fast-paced adventure with many characters and where contemporary world is mixed with Ancient Greek mythology. I am in a group with 5th grade boys and read My Side of the Mountain. This on the other hand is a book about a boy who chose to live alone in a forest. He is learning how to survive and finds time to observe the nature and his inner thoughts. The biggest question my group is discussing is how realistic is the book and what choices would we make if we were in the boy's shoes. We will have two more weeks of Literature Circle meetings. During the third week of February we will have a book week and our schedule is mixed up. We will pause with the Literature Circles and resume after February break.

Practice makes perfect

Even though dance has filled most of our days, we made sure we were still working toward our goal to master multi-digit subtraction. Every day the students solved some problems, thinking through whether they needed or didn't need to regroup when subtracting. As soon as they had done their problems, they checked their answers and figured out why they had made a mistake. Was it because they still didn't exactly understand how to subtract or did they make a careless computation error. 

The students are at different levels.

Some still need the blocks to help them understand what they are doing.

Some can talk the problems through and mark the changes that happen after regrouping.

Some can figure answers out without marking the changes, but need more practice to avoid careless mistakes.

On Friday I gave a small quiz (similar to the one I gave on Monday) to see how the students learning had grown and whether they had achieved the goal.

Drawing

This week has been a Dance and Draw week. Like writers, the illustrators go through a process of planning, drafting and crafting. Our fictional narratives are almost done, and we work as picture book authors, combining pictures and words. This time consuming task will take us more than a week. Only one student so far has been playing with the layout.