Wiggly Worms!

We continued with our Ecology unit this week by learning more about and exploring decomposers.  The best decomposers we could find to study were worms!  We first read a non-fiction book called Yuck! Worms! that taught us about the importance of worms as decomposers in our ecosystem.  Then we watched a short Discovery Education video and then finally we had the opportunity to be "hands-on" with worms!!  The children had the chance to observe the worms with magnifying glasses. As they observed, they wrote down their noticings, descriptions, and any diagrams of the worm.  This was definitely one of the highlights of the week!  Be sure to ask your child to explain the role decomposers play in the ecosystem.  Also during Reader's Workshop, we began reading My Side of the Mountain looked for ways that this book connects to our ecology unit.  As we read the first two chapters, we looked for references of animals, plants, abiotic (non-living- rocks, sun, weather, clouds,etc.,) or decomposers.

In writer's workshop, we continued drafting our second adaptations of fairy tales.  This week we focused on revising throughout the drafting process and making sure to have a balance of action and dialogue in their stories.  Next week, we will start the last section of the Fairy Tale unit and each child will be creating and writing his or her own fairy tale!

In math we began our geometry unit by discussing the many vocabulary words that go along with this unit, such as vertex, parallel, symmetry, congruent, similar, quadrilateral, parallelogram, etc. We also focused on identifying the attributes of special quadrilaterals. The children worked in partnerships to create a poster for either a trapezoid, parallelogram, rhombus, or square.  The posters had to include attributes, examples and non-examples of the shape, and a sentence that explained the shape's most important attribute.  We also had the opportunity to work with tangrams.  Tangrams are an ancient Chinese puzzle in which you try to put 7 shapes together to form a square. These were a challenge!  Was your child able to put the tangram puzzle together? Lastly, we learned a new Work Place which required us to build various polygons using 2, 3, or 4 of the tangram pieces.

Have a great weekend!