Measuring UP
9/27/2019
This week has been packed full of so many wonderful activities. We began our week with a great lesson in growth mindset from our amazing second graders. They stood up confidently in front of the student body and explained their design and engineering process for their egg vessels and then dropped them from over 30 feet! Some eggs broke into smithereens, others merely cracked, while a few survived unscathed. What the important lesson to our students was that not one of the second graders displayed a poor attitude or felt defeated from their cracked egg. It was an opportunity for them to think about what they could improve upon and how they could make changes in the future to be more successful. I overheard many of our first graders talking about how they were excited to do this project next year in 2nd grade and how they would design their egg vessels! I always love opportunities where the community rallies around each other and shares knowledge and experiences Students were also exposed to coding and robotics this week in our very cool tech den. Since we have been studying biomimicry this past month, we talked about how we can design robots to mimic animals and/or plants in nature. Students designed a human code using game pieces adhered to the floor and then used this knowledge to code their Lego creations from Lego We Do kits. These young children grasped the concept so quickly and were designing code to make their robots sing, flash different colors, and beep - among many other commands! This is a meaningful hands-on experience that makes technology really fun for young learners! This week, we delved in even deeper into good reading habits and how to improve our bad reading habits. Ask your first grader what it means to do "the freeze" when it comes to reading! We also introduced new first grade snap words to our word wall, emphasizing the chunks, blends, and vowel pairs we have been learning in class. Students are getting faster and faster recognizing these parts of words, which is a key component in reading fluency. I can tell that these next few weeks are going reveal a big burst of reading growth in your young readers! And what is a day of school without a solid math lesson? This is an integral part of our morning routine and we wrapped up our week learning about standard vs non-standard measurement, estimating length, and using popsicle sticks to measure the room - and each other. I spent quite a bit of time lying on the floor with lots of popsicle sticks lined up to measure the teacher! Students also had a fun time using measuring tape to observe and measure elements within our play ground space. Our busy week came to its close with a wonderful performance of Mary Poppins at the Sydney Lawrence Theater in downtown Anchorage. One of our awesome 4th graders was in the show and it was incredibly fun for our student body to see him perform! For many of our young students, this was one of their first experiences seeing a live performance in a theater venue. Our students represented PNA with wonderful manners, positivity, and respect. I even had a few students show a sincere interest in performing on stage in the future after this experience!
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Hali TuomiMs. Tuomi has over five years experience in ASD, where she taught first and fifth grade classrooms. An avid skier, Ms. Tuomi is a Magna Cum Laude graduate of Alaska Pacific University’s Bachelor of Arts in K-8 Education. Archives
April 2021
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