The students are so excited to move further into their new science unit on Life Cycles! Their tiny caterpillars arrived over a week ago, and the children each have their own in a small plastic cup with a lid to watch their caterpillar carefully inside. They have been observing and documenting the changes they notice in their science notebooks. The caterpillars have grown from 1/2 centimeter, up to about 3 centimeters in size! The children marked their calendars with the date they predict that their caterpillar will emerge from its chrysalis as a Painted Lady butterfly.
We also looked at the life cycle of the bean plant, the sheep, and the frog. We noticed that some animals have offspring that look just like them only smaller, yet others (like the frog) have offspring that look completely different (a tadpole!)
Vocabulary words the children worked with include: cycle, organism, life cycle, embryo, offspring,
larva, life span, and reproduce.
We had some really terrific reading lessons this week. Skills we practiced included:
Compare/Contrast
One lesson had us compare/contrast the similarities and differences between sea turtles, tortoises, and land/water turtles. The children read and learned about how these animals move, what their shells look like, if their necks go in their shell, and how their legs/feet allow them to move on land or in the water. We filled in a Matrix that we were able to program in the way that helped us best process this information. Another way to compare/contrast is through the use of the good old Venn Diagram!
Reporters Notebook
We read about the life of Gertrude Ederle, an Olympic swimmer who swam across the English Channel. We worked to answer the "reporter" questions of who, what, where, why, when and how in order to pull the most important facts out of the text.
Nonfiction text features
We reviewed nonfiction text features that include a table of contents, an index, a glossary, photos, captions, subtitles, bullet points etc. We realized that our Time for Kids and National Geographic for Kids newspapers were perfect texts to identify and use these features to help us understand the text!
Description text structure (main idea/details)
The children and I noticed during our lesson on text structure that often, a paragraph begins with a main idea and details follow right behind. The main idea is typically repeated in some way at the end of the article or paragraph. We practiced reading to identify the main idea and details in our independent reading.
We have begun Unit 7 in math. In this unit, children will explore number patterns to reinforce their numeration skills, and prepare them for the concepts of multiplication and division. We will investigate patterns, move on to add and subtract multi-digit numbers, and work with data by creating frequency tables, line plots, and bar graphs.
Book club began today, and will continue during lunch recess for the next 3 Mondays. I was so happy to see that about half of our class decided to participate! Hooray for reading!
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