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.

We are studying wood.  We know that wood is a material and we observed wood's properties.  We looked at samples of pine, cedar, basswood, particle board and plywood.  The first three come from trees (pine from a pine tree, cedar from a cedar tree, basswood from a linden tree), but particle board is made from wood waste, saw dust, and glue and plywood is made from gluing layers of wood together.  We talked about what happens when wood gets wet- it either absorbs the water or the water beads up.  The pine absorbed the water, but the water beaded up on the particle board.  Next we talked about whether or not wood floats.  We saw that it floats even if we band a few pieces together and even if we leave it in the water overnight.  Today we talked about how we could get our wood samples to sink.  We used paper clips and elastics and found that 19 paper clips will sink. a pine sample.  We found that 17 or 18 paper clips will sink a particle board sample.   
We are really enjoying this unit!

We have been solving story problems.  We made a chart of how we show our problem solving thinking. Our math coach, Mrs. Kidd, helped us make a chart of our thinking, then after we solved a problem she added our work to the chart. We can refer to this chart now to make sure we remember to show
all of our strong math thinking! We also use our chart to check our work and find any mistakes! 

It was kindness week this week.  We talked about how our actions and our words can be kind or unkind.  We made of list of kind actions and words- compliments are kind; encouragement is kind; helping is kind; cooperating is kind, etc. 
We decided that we are going to try to choose kindness... not just this week, but every day! We talked about how sometimes we think unkind thoughts, but we should't always say them. For example, if we don't l like something Mom made for dinner, we don't have to say, "yuck!" WE can keep it in our brains. We discussed lots of scenarios and how we could choose to do the right thing and leave unkind thoughts in our brains! We also talked about choosing to say something kind instead.  We could always say, "I liked the other chicken dinner better, Mom."  We read a book called Have You Filled Your Bucket Today? It was about how kindness "fills our bucket", but unkind gestures and words "dip" from our bucket. We started to track kindness by adding to our class bucket when we do kind things for each other.  Hopefully with each act of kindness we CAN make our world a better place!

We studied how the oil on a penguin's feathers and their blubber help keep them warm.  First we put petroleum jelly on our finger and noticed how the water beaded up when we put our finger in it.  This shows how most of the water won't make it to the penguin's skin.  Then we covered our glove hand with crisco to simulate blubber.  We put both hands in ice cold water and wow! The gloved hand was warm even though the water was icy cold!