We celebrated Valentine's Day this week! We read Love Monster and did lots of activities to learn about story elements.  
 

 

 

                                                               

         We finished our Science Unit on wood!  
We studied this as part of our Matter and Materials Kit. We had a lot of fun as we made predictions and tested out our claims using evidence from our observations and trials.  We are learning to write a conclusion using words from the focus question.  
        The next part of this kit is all about paper.  

We are continuing to enjoy our science unit on Matter.  We talked about being "engineers". Engineers make and observe mixtures. We continued to explore wood.  We looked at sawdust and wood shavings and compared them. Then we made mixture by mixing them together.  We found that the sawdust was hard to see. Then we took it a step further and added the mixture to water and stirred it up.  We talked about how the wood was "waterlogged", which means very soggy.  Then I asked how we could get our wood back! We had some really great ideas.  Devin thought we could use our hand to keep the sawdust from coming through, just the water would. Then we used a screen to strain our wood mixture.  We found that the water was cloudy and Liam saw that it was an orange color.  So what is making the water that way? We had great discussions and finally we decided that it must be from the wood! We decided to try to strain the water even more by using a paper towel inside the screen.  When we did that we could see the sawdust left behind! Boy, Scientist have to think hard! 

              

      

Julian is writing his conclusion. 

We are working hard in science! At the start of each lesson we ask a "focus question".  This drives our inquiry.  We then test things out and find our "conclusion".  We are learning to use words from the question in our conclusion. In this lesson the focus question is: How can you change the shape of wood? We concluded that "You can use sand paper to change the shape of wood."  We smoothed out edges, we rounded out the sides, we had so much fun learning about science by diving in and testing our predictions!

Mila is writing her conclusion. 

Kai is smoothing out the sides. 

Landon is using trial and error to see how he can change the shape of his block of wood. 

Snow 
   Much
      Fun! 

Our melted Sneezy's!

We had a lot of fun reading and writing about snowmen! We even had snowmen in our math problems! We read some great books. The first was Sneezy the Snowman.  We learned about story elements and practiced retelling the story.  Sneezy had a problem- he was cold! He tried 3 things to help solve his problem, but he melted each time.  There are things a snowman just shouldn't do! Sneezy's friends tried to find a solution for him.  First they gave him a hat.  Still cold.  Then they gave him a scarf. Still cold. Then they gave him a jacket. Oops! Now Sneezy is hot! He thought maybe he should take the clothes off, but we all knew that if he did that he would just be cold again.  His friends suggested leaving the clothes on AND eating ice-cream! The clothes  and 7 scoops of ice-cream was the solution! 

We also read Snowmen at Night. This book explains why snowmen sometimes look droopy... they've been up playing all night! We drew and wrote about what OUR snowmen do! We also drew and wrote about what snowmen should NOT do! We did lots of sequencing and story element work on these two books.  We are learning soooo much! 

Let it snow! We played with "snow" that Mrs. Carr and Ms. Maynard made! It even felt cold! It was a fun way to end a fun unit on snow and snowmen! We learned a lot about snow.  Did you know that snow is actually clear? The reflection of the sun makes it look white.  We thought that was a pretty cool fact! We will learn about animals and winter and do a study on bears this week.  I'm sure we'll have lots more fun as we learn! 

Trying to get wood to sink!

We made good predictions as we figured it out! 

It took so many paper clips to make it sink! 

Almost sunk!

We worked together to attach our paper clips and sink our wood.