Spanish Literacy
Last week we started our last literacy unit, En el mar. One of our overarching goals for this unit is to have students learn more about oceans and ocean-related topics through listening to and reading various kinds of printed materials, while building vocabulary and exploring the topic creating hands-on arts and crafts. We have read several different stories this week, both fiction and non-fiction, that explore the plants and animals that live in and around oceans. Some of our favorite stories this week included, Swimmy, El mar, El oceano, El pez arcoiris y la ballena, Humphry y la ballena perdida, amongst others. Students worked on expert groups focusing on one sea animal and sharing their learning with the class. What a fun literacy week!
Spanish Math
This week in math, we finished our last math unit, El dinero, the best way possible: selling and buying toys at our little tiendita! We all had such a great time figuring out the different amounts of money needed to purchase something. We also had a great discussion about the concept of money. It is pretty insightful to hear their interesting comments and ideas! You can most definitely support at home by playing store, playing a trading coin game, or picking a handful of coins and estimating how many!
“Learning to count coins also implements what children already know about sorting, likeness, and differences, counting, adding, subtracting, using numbers sentences, and so on.” -Math in Focus
English Social Studies
This week we began a unit on Stories. The class will be hearing several stories through out this unit, some familiar and some new, such as Chicken Little, Three Billy Goats Gruff, and Momotaro: Peach Boy to name a few.
Our objectives were to :
• Demonstrate familiarity with these stories
• Understand that stories can be a kind of fiction, or a narrative that comes from a writer’s imagination
• Understand fiction can be in many different forms, including folktales
• Identify the beginning, middle, and end of a story
• identify the characters and setting in a story
Our new sorts this week were the diagraph “st” and “s” and “t” sounds we also worked on recognizing vowels and their sounds. Our songs for the week was “Magnets” and “Old MacDonald Had Some Vowels”.
For handwriting we practiced writing our vowels.
English Science
This week we began a short unit on magnets. Some students shared magnets from home. The class listened to read -alouds about magnets and had a great time experimenting with them.
Sharing my magnets!
Our objectives were to :
• Understand that magnets got their name from an area of the world that was once called Magnesia and that sailors used Lodestones from this area as navigational tools.
• Identify the North and South poles of a magnet
• Recognize that like poles repel and opposite poles attract
• Understand that magnets are attracted to iron
• Understand that the Earth’s core is made of mostly iron