Laurel Creek 2012-2013: Laurel Creek blog -- Week 21

Week 21 1/23-1/27

Our first full-length week since before winter break and one bookended by Chinese New Year festivities. We created a giant dragon puppet; watched acrobats; helped a familiar alien with a math dilemma; celebrated Rainbow Day; wrote about our lives, our structures, and a book; and ate two large bowls of won tons.

Julianne came in on Monday to guide us through the creation of a full-sized dragon puppet. We watched a video and then went to work cutting out triangle-shaped adornments and drawing scales. The next step is finishing with watercolor. Check back next week for photos of the completed piece.

News
Students wrote about the news of their lives as they do each week. Make sure you come in to see our News wall where we have collected every installment since we began in the Fall.

Field Trip to Zellerbach Hall to see the Peking Acrobats. We took an AC Transit bus to the event. We discussed that the bus is the 4th mode of transportation we have used this year to get us to our destination. The list so far:

1. cars/vans
2. train
3. our feet
4. bus

Though we would like to add plane to the list we concluded that that wasn't likely to happen. But boat perhaps. If you have any field trip ideas that might take us across the water, let us know!

Literacy Time
Some students worked on l-influenced vowel sorts (e.g. the a in fall doesn't make the short a sound you would expect it to), others participated in guided reading which focused on sight words, and still others harvested known words for their Word Banks.

Book Time!
Students select and read just right books from the classroom library

Our alien acquaintance Klaxor returned to the classroom with another mathematical quandary. Students used the number line to help Klaxor determine whether he had enough units of fuel to make it to the Oort Cloud (50,000 Astronomical Units or nearly 1 light year away). This was a challenging activity that required students to carefully keep track of the changing data on a number line.

Terry and Tommy
Our friends Terry and Tommy discovered a new sound this week, /b/, the bubbling sound.

Structure work
Continuing our investigation of structures, we contemplated play structures and considered what would be required to make them stand safely. Some of what we learn will carry over into later activities where we will be building 3-dimensional structures. Below students are making improvements to the structure drawn on the whiteboard. The class then went on to draw a play structure of their own devising.

Teasing
As part of our social and emotional learning curriculum, we have begun a unit on teasing. We kicked things off by reading the book, Oliver Button is a Sissy. Following the story, students wrote and drew an alternate ending to the tale. We had a wide variety of approaches and results as students thought about this important topic.

Rainbow Day
We celebrated Tate's invented holiday. We did rainbow math problems, made rainbow patterns, read rainbow-themed books. Everyone also got to ice rainbow cookies with frosting the students dyed themselves. They determined which 2 primary or secondary colors they would use and mixed them, coming up with a unique color that they then named.

Math Choice
39 Oh -- a challenging game which helps students develop an understanding of number sequence, magnitude, and logic.

Tangrams-- A geometric tile placement activity

Village Builder-- Here students construct a village out of pattern blocks in the most efficient manner possible. The game develops number sense by encouraging students to think about the ways numbers can be broken apart in different ways (9=4+5 but also 9=1+1+1+1+3+2).

Friday's Chinese New Year's celebration

Lucas' mom, Sherry, started things off by reading us a story about the origins of the Chinese zodiac. We then went on to make crafts, food, and good cheer for the new year.