May 9-13

We finally made the video of our book, Le Tambour Magique, and I will soon make it available for you to view. The kids did a great job of reading their writing and keeping quiet for the recording. We had a lot of students read their writing this week (author's chair) in order to catch up a bit - so many kids want to read to the class and they can find the wait frustrating. We also continued to work on our "son" book and the other Daily 5 activities.

We spent the week exploring patterns. We talked about patterns in our lives, from daily routines to astronomical patterns to life cycles. In partners, each student created a pattern with various materials. When I gave the signal, they switched and began working on their partner's pattern, extending it. We had a couple of hands-on pattern building sessions like this.

Then we added a new wrinkle: one person made the pattern, then the other person had to label it with letters (A, B, C) to identify the structure of the pattern. Another task was to build a pattern from a given structure (eg. ABAC) and then have the partner figure out the structure.

We also spent a period outside on a warm day and made clapping patterns, and person patterns (eg. striped shirt, solid shirt) to repeat and guess. The important concepts for the kids to gain through all this experience are that a pattern has elements that repeat, and the core that repeats can be analyzed and labelled in order to identify families of patterns. 

We also did a story problem in math. It was a complex problem, but I provided the answer and just asked the kids to explain why. They have been doing these problems in pairs, and I provided them with a series of steps to the problem-solving process to help them collaborate better. I have been seeing math partners working in parallel, each doing their own thing and not interacting very much. So now my emphasis is on talking together, using math manipulatives to figure out a problem together, and communicating their thinking. 

Continuing our exploration of energy, we watched an episode of the Magic Schoolbus in French about energy. We discussed the events of the show and we will watch it again next week. The kids need to see it more than once to really understand what is being communicated. We will be having a full day focused on Energy on Monday, and that will wrap up our unit!