History & Geography

We continued our unit on China this week. We watched a video about the Great Wall of China and read about its history.  We learned about Chinese language and writing and practiced writing some Chinese characters ourselves. On Tuesday we got to

see the 3/4 grade class put on an original play about Charlemagne.

Our objectives
• understand the importance of ancestors in Chinese beliefs.
• understand the ways that ancestor worship has been practiced
• recognize the Great Wall
• understand the feat of building the Great Wall
• understand how the Chinese language is written and read
• recognize the historical and artistic value of writing to the Chinese

 

Science

This week in our science domain Cycles in Nature, we finished learning about the life cycle of a frog. We spent the rest of week writing a paragraph about the life cycle of a frog. Students took notes, worked on a rough draft and we’ll finish editing these next week. We also learned the a fun new song about frogs.

Our objectives were to:
• explain that a cycle is a sequence of events that repeats itself again and again
• identify the 4 stages of the life cycle of a frog and use appropriate vocabulary when writing about these stages
• explain metamorphosis and amphibian

English Spelling and Writing

In our journals we used the idiom of the week, “She is down in the dumps “.  For spelling we worked on sorting our ways in a variety of way and took our practice test on Friday. Our word wall words this week were: children, clock, don’t, didn’t

La lectura

This week we reread Un hongo en la lluvia. Our weekly objectives were to:

• Understand and practice the blends pr, pl, and dr

• Review using capital letters at the beginning of our sentences

• Use the comprehension strategies making predictions and summarizing

• Use the comprehension skill drawing conclusions

Our new high frequency words for next week are nueve, agua, and siete. Our review high frequency words for next week are bueno and gracias.

Las matemáticas

This week we finished working with subtraction up to 1,000 and began working with Bar Models. Our weekly objectives were to:

• Correct any missed problems on the math test

• Use bar models to solve addition and subtraction problems

• Apply the inverse operations of addition and subtraction

 

Specialists:

Music with Ms. Erin

In October we learned about major and minor sounds, and how to sing the first five steps of the minor scale in Solfege. We introduced singing harmony. We learned about the xylophone and got to play student written songs on the glockenspiel. We also learned about Vivaldi, and listened to Autumn from his Four Seasons. We created Jack-o’-lanterns with faces made from musical notation symbols.

In November we will be focusing on various instruments, and the styles of music they are popularly used for – including piano (classical, jazz, rock), violin (classical, celtic fiddle, contemporary), and guitar (classical, blues, rock).
We will get to hear some famous pieces by composers Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. We will also listen to classical violinist Itzhak Perlman, and contemporary violinist Lindsey Stirling.

 

Art with Ms. Kelly

The first and second graders have painted some beautiful pumpkins this month. They learned how to overlap shapes to make their pumpkins look more realistic, and they used tempera paint to mix their own orange and green colors. The following week they used watercolors to make some more beautiful pumpkin paintings –  these glowing pumpkins are on the bulletin board at the end of the hall.

We also started a Chinese dragon picture, using a variety of textures. The students are learning how to combine stamping, collage (cut out shapes), and drawing to create a famous Chinese symbol. We also looks at Eric Carle’s book Dragons Dragons for inspiration. Hopefully we can finish these next week on Halloween!

Many thanks to Barbara Wagner for helping out in this class, as well as the 5th/6th grade class! She also provided several pumpkins and dried artichokes for all the students to observe for their various art projects.