All Rainbows Five for Friday

 

It is Five for Friday! ...okay...it is Monday. I started this post and then decided I needed more pictures only now we are having a snow day...I added 2 new mini-units today from last week and they are currently in sale (because it took me so long to get them up and we loved them both in class).
 

We have had a busy week. We started researching weather.

 

 

Provocations  to start our Cycles unit (weather & seasons)

1

Instead of one big introduction, this was done slowly. First, pictures and the central idea went up around the room and on our focus board. Then, I put out different readers in reading group and had them decide what the covers had in common. Finally, the songs. We watched and sang: "You'll sing a song. I'll sing a song." We created our own verses standing in line at bus dismissal thinking of activities we could do in both warm or wintry weather (pre-assessment anyone?).

2

We have one bulletin board for posting our central idea, lines of inquiry, vocabulary, books, etc... I converted a smaller board into our Inquiry board. I Wonder and I Learned. It is quickly filling up. The students worked with partners to come up with at least one question about weather or seasons (we are still working on the difference between how and why but they did great.). After they drafted their questions, they met with me to revise/edit them. Then they wrote them and drew a picture to hang on our inquiry wall.

3

Decomposing Ten into Rainbows

This was such a fun activity and craft. First, we played shake and drop. I gave each student a ten frame of raindrops. They colored the drops and cut apart the ten into ten ones.

I gave each student an umbrella page. We played shake and drop with the raindrops on the umbrella. If the raindrops landed face up (blue), we sorted them to the top - face down went below the umbrella. We played stand up-sit down each time to find out whether the number friends dropped above was greater than those below or the same as me. Lots of Math talk, I'd pick someone to "read" their paper 10 is ___ and ___.

After a few rounds of everyone shaking, we became a team to complete the recording sheet. Different students took turns shaking on the projector and the class did "make yours look like mine". We "read" the paper and colored in the ten frames on the recording sheet. We wrote the combination on the clouds. Each time we checked to see if we had made that combination already. We made all 11 combinations and recorded ten for our rainbows.

When discussed the lesson so far and... one of my students who doesn't often chime in raised his hand. In one burst he said, "I really enjoyed this activity." Wow.

 

4

The next day, we turned our investigation into the combinations of ten into a rainbow. We used 1 inch strips (because I overcut for the 100th day). We made clouds and on our clouds we wrote ways to represent ten: the numeral, number word, ten frame, ten fingers (and a few drew 10 toes). We reviewed our recording sheet. They made 5 strips by writing the number sentence and drawing drops over the numerals. For the other five, I gave them mini-ten frames to color and write. You could use 2 inch strips and cut the recording sheet apart.

5 Readers
We used our series readers to begin this week and one of my groups requested to have one I made. : ) Gotta love that. We started with the one where they can write if it is hot, cold or warm out. They love to add details and write answers in their readers. My favorite page was when we drew the reefs in. A quick lesson on that habitat. Okay, we liked adding to the baseball page, and...

Enjoy!

Jenn

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