Cookies, History & Hot Chocolate!
1/11/2019
So, the last week just before the holiday, the Fourth and Fifth Grades were the hosts of another fun parent lunch, expertly set up by several parents! The theme was a cookie exchange, and with the holidays coming up the mood was festive! Students brought in cookies made at home and then help themselves to a veritable smorgasbord of every flavor of cooking under the (midnight) sun! The students also discussed the topics of their Language Arts and Social Studies papers with parents. They outlined their ideas for the direction in which their stories were going, as well as discussed things they uncovered in their research! The Third Graders got in on the festivities, as well, hosting their own parent lunch up in Mrs. Orbase's classroom. In the photo below, please check them out in their holiday-themed sweaters and hats! As you can tell by the smiles on their faces, a fun time was had by all! Merging Language Arts & Social StudiesOne of the coolest thing about Language Arts and Social Studies is how very well the two subjects compliment one another. You can't have Social Studies without Language Arts, and you can't have Language Arts without Social Studies. The value of the stories of our past depend on the clarity of our language in telling them, as well as the accuracy and depth of our research. This week, Third, Fourth and Fifth grade studies both of these as they discussed how to read and interpret texts in order to get the fullest and most accurate picture possible. What is a heading? What are captions? How does a map serve the story? How can we read the events of a story on a map. We addressed all of these questions this week in Language Arts and in Social Studies. We also built timelines in both Language Arts, and Social Studies, in order to better take a look at the context of the historical fiction pieces that we're working on. In the photo below, a student takes a look at the events before and after the time of her story in order to better understand where people were coming from, and where they were going... in order to write more accurate characters and situations. In the photos above, students read through their stories not with the eye of a writer, but with the eye of an historian. They looked for possible flaws and anachronisms within their stories, and did their best to correct them. They didn't always have the answers, but that's okay -- the point of the exercise was to find those questionable items and then further research them for accuracy. In Third Grade Social Studies, we followed a similar theme, looking at the land bridge that connected Alaska with Eurasia about twenty thousand years ago. We also took at look at Alaska Native construction techniques, studying the particular sod house and igloos built by Native peoples thousands of years ago. We discussed the ways in which their construction kept people warm and allowed them to survive the harsh climate. In the photos below, we compared the way that a sod house traps heat with the way that the hood of a jacket traps heat. Later, at recess, we also took a look at how the tire toys set out on the playground trapped heat when we pulled a tarp over the top. A few Third Graders even had to jump out in order to cool off! Just For Fun...And, just because we felt like doing it... Comments are closed.
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Jessica GrahamMs. Graham graduated from the University of Alabama with a BS in Early Childhood/Elementary Education, and is currently working on her master's in reading. She enjoys hiking, traveling, arts & crafts, and playing the ukulele. Archives
April 2021
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