Weekly Update: 2/5 - 2/9

Reader's Workshop
Our read alouds:
- Little Red, by Bethan Woollvin
- Little Red Riding Hood, Jerry Pinkney
- Little Roja Riding Hood
- Interstellar Cinderella
- The Stinky Cheese Man
- The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig
- The True Story of the Three Little Pigs
- Little Red Riding Sheep

We used Venn diagrams to compare two versions of Little Red Riding Hood. We identified 8 essential elements in the Little Red Riding Hood story. We went back in time and acted like the Grimm brothers, looking at similarities in three versions of the same dialogue.

We read Billy Collins' poem, "My Hero." This is a play on the tortoise and the hare story, but has a lot of interesting elements to discuss.

Writer's Workshop
We did a lot of work with describing this past week!
- describing objects in a scene
- playing a describing guessing game to practice providing details about an object in a setting
- writing a descriptive passage to match our geometric illustrations from last week

Then, we started planning our own versions of Little Red Riding Hood. We had to plan out the characters, setting, solution, and what will be different.

Math
We started the farm game! Ask us how it works.

We started our next math unit, multiplication by 2, 5, and 10. We practiced skip counting, and did a lot of work with arrays. We also did some very difficult work with equations. In an equation, the equals sign means "the same as" and everything on both sides needs to balance. Here is one of our tricky problems: 6 x 2 = ____ x 2 + ____ = _____ . It was hard not to just put 12 into the first blank!

Our second tricky problem was from a book called Anno's Mysterious Multiplying Jar. In this book, there is 1 ocean, with 2 islands in it. Each island has 3 mountains, and each mountain has 4 walled kingdoms. Each kingdom has 5 villages in it. We had to figure out how many villages were in the whole jar! This was very tricky, but drawing a visual model was a great strategy to help when we got stuck.

Science
What happens when water runs over the land? To investigate this question, we made some stream tables with sand in paint trays. We developed a way to do fair tests so we could compare our results in a scientific way. We did a few experiments with these stream tables:
- water running down with just sand
- water flowing down with a house on the sand
- developing and building ways of protecting the house from the flood
- looking at three kinds of riverbanks, and how the materials prevented erosion

Our Stream Tables 2018 from Stephen MacLellan on Vimeo.

News and Other Information
Two of our morning meeting questions:
- If you could have tickets to any concert, what music would you want to hear?
- Would you rather come face to face with a giant octopus or a dragon?

We had fun playing in the snow!