The Power of YET!

Today we finished our second round of analogy Jumpstarts for our morning warm-up. We also stretched our brains with a "word work" activity by creating as many words as possible from the word confidence. How many words can you create? (3 or more letters, no names, and no abbreviations) We created 23 in 8 minutes.:)

We dug a little deeper into finding the area of irregular shapes in The Measurement in Me Math curriculum.  Students are becoming more comfortable with decomposing/partitioning and using the area formula to calculate square units.  They did really well on our challenge problem and finding lengths based on other given measurements.

Today during our Mindset Moment, we viewed a short video clip from Wondergrove learning where the characters Moby and Katy discover the power of YET!  Today's discussion and questions asked students to be reflective about their own experiences with fear of asking for help when encountering a problem task or struggle, the appropriate response when needed help, and understanding the great power contained in the small word YET!  Students responded to discussion questions in their journals and completed a "think, pair, share" exercise with two different classmates.  

• Why is the word ”yet” so powerful? Think of a ”yet” moment in your life and discuss it with your neighbor!
• Ask your student to share their "YET" moment with you and discuss the power of the word.:)

We also exercised our critical thinking skills during a fast and furious game to solve the "Daily Set Puzzle".  Madelyn was the first to find all 6 sets this week.  Who will be next?

                              

                                             Madelyn perseveres to complete the Daily Set puzzle from setpuzzle.com.

We ended the day with a brief workshop in their Medieval Times Lapbooks and discussion of Chapter 3- Protecting the Castle in our Knights and Castles Magic Tree House Fact Finder book.  Students then chose to create a castle diagram or vocabulary matching game to highlight the vital components needed to keep the occupants safe.

Deconstruction Tuesday

Today our Jumpstart brought us back to our strategy of creating bridge sentences for completing analogies.  We are looking at types of relationships and considered opposites, degree, functions, type, and lack.  Try a few examples from today's challenge and ask your student if your answer is correct.:) 

For our Mindset Moment, students watched a short Wondergrove video where they were introduced to Mojo and his discovery about what challenges can do for his brain as he struggled to build a successful rocket.  We also considered the following questions regarding growth mindset...

• What does it feel like when something is too challenging? Is it wrong that we feel this way?

• What kind of attitude should we take on when facing a challenge, and why is that important?

• When taking on a challenge, it's okay to ask for help or to take a break to reflect, like Mojo did! Does this mean we aren't growing our brain anymore?

In Math today we continued in our study of area where students discovered that figures with the same area can have a very different shape. They were able to find as many different ways as possible to draw an irregular shape with an area of 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17 or 19 square centimeters on grid paper.  We then worked on partitioning and deconstructing those figures into rectangles and squares and writing number sentence equations using L x W to show the area for each portion and add to find the total area in square centimeters.  Your student may challenge you to complete this process with an unused object from our lesson.  Happy Deconstructing!:)

We were excited to continue part 2 of our Medieval Times project today.  Students broke ground on our book study of Knights and Castles by Mary Pope Osborne last week, completed a Medieval timeline, and continued construction on their lapbook castles!

Word Nerd and Area Adventures

Today we began by helping decode some of the Word Nerd's fancy sentences using our knowledge of Greek and Latin roots.  We also used our growth mindset and persistence to work around portions of the sentence until we made useful vocabulary connection.  Next week, we will work on writing 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 whole square units, finding larger regular rectangles within the shape to use the formula for finding area, A= length x width,  as a short cut, and counting the remaining whole squares for the total area.

Our class model

Student created model