Word Nerd Adventures

Today we began by helping decode some of the Word Nerd's fancy sentences using our knowledge of Greek and Latin roots.  We then used some dressed up synonyms to write Tyler our own misadventures.

For math, we embarked on Chapter 2 and a deeper study of area.  We looked at irregular shapes and strategies for calculating the space they cover.  Students traced their fried eggs and estimated the surface area, piecing together fragments to make wholes, finding larger rectangles within the shape to use the length times width shortcut, and counting whole squares for the grand total.  Next class, we will undergo the challenge of calculating our own area!

Our Jacob's Ladder reading focus was on finishing our analysis on The Dog and His Reflection by Aesop.  Students finished their Slide presentations and were able to present their ideas on theme, inferences, and cause and effect in the story to the class.  They did a great job!  If you have a Google account have them share their work with you!

For our Mindset Moment, we read the book, The Most Magnificent Thing, by Ashley Spires and looked at a great thing coming from the pieces of many mistakes along the way.

Finally, Students got to login to our class Chess Kids account to begin moving up the ranks with lessons, videos, and online practice.  We also filled in our history and strategy for the Knight in our chess sketchbooks.

Mindset Challenge

Our morning Jumpstart today focused on Greek and Latin prefixes.  Students looked a the meanings of various prefixes and used that to build words to match a definition.  They also brainstormed words they were familiar with the contained the word part.  They did a great job building their decoding skills!

For math today, we split into work stations to review and strengthen our understanding of area and perimeter.  Students used crackers to build and calculate dimensions of ice rinks, evaluated the chess board for its area and perimeter, played some online review games, and corrected any errors on their Chapter 1 check-up from last week.

Our Jacob's Ladder story this week is The Dog and his Reflection by Aesop.  They used the story to focus on sequencing, cause and effect, and consequences and implications.  This week they used Google slides to organize and present their ideas about the story.

For our Mindset Moment, students were challenged to build a copy of a paper statue only by sight.  As they worked, we recorded their self-talk and discussed as a class how they approached the difficult task and the effect that had on the outcome.

For chess today, we had a center ring model match to help us discuss movement and strategic decision making!

Area

We began our time together with our morning Jumpstart.  Today students were using clues to morph words and build vocabulary with our Word Ladder activity.  Next, it was on to math where we had some very dedicated dog pen designers.  We were able to continue our lesson from last week to create the best space for the new pet.  Students used the ordered list from last week to select two pens to draw on their grid paper.  Once the pens were drawn, students were able to consider the two-dimensional aspect of area.  Lots of of square counting later, we had the areas of our different pens, and were able to choose the best design to give Fido the most space.  Next week we will get into a more technical understanding of area and strategies to measure it.  We finished off math with this Pac-Man review game and a team round of Kahoot to review all of our measurement concepts. Students then completed our lesson check-ups as an assessment of learning.

For our Mindset Moment, students looked at some common phrases hear in the classroom and used their knowledge of growth and fixed Mindset to sort the comments into the category they represented.  It is fun to hear the student's language start to change as they become aware of its underlying implications.

In reading today, we finished the story of Daedalus and Icarus by completing our ladder and looking at the story in terms of  literary elements, inferences, and theme.  Students were able to define relationships between characters, provide reasoning for our hero's actions, and use the text to support the main concept of freedom throughout the story.

We ended with our chess strategy session.  We reviewed and completed our sketchbook pages for the rook, and played a class demo game highlighting our new strategies of controlling the center of the board, bringing out knights and bishops, and castling.