Pine Glen Room 101: March 2014

Monday, March 31, 2014

PJ Day!

Mr. Lyons informed students that Tuesday, April 1 would be a pajama day! Impressed with the hard work and extra efforts that the school went through in piloting the PARCC assessments to students in grades 3-5 during the last week, he decided to reward everyone.

Anyone who would like to wear pajamas to school tomorrow is welcome!

Saturday, March 29, 2014

Practicing our Number Words with the help of Dr. Jean

Listening, singing and moving along to songs by Dr. Jean we practiced identifying and spelling our number words as we made the connection to numerals and values. Our number word quiz was held this week and Mrs. Hoyt and Mrs. Parnell were very impressed with how well everyone did!

Magnet Show with Mr. Musselman from the Science Center

The question posed by Mr. Musselman......."Are bigger magnets stronger magnets?" Much to our surprise the answer was no! We were amazed to see that the smallest magnet Mr. Musselman brought to the magnet show was the one that held the most magnets.

Brainstorming about Magnets and creating an Alphabox to help us write!

To brainstorm facts to add to our Alphabox, Mrs. Parnell challenged us to "Turn and Talk" . We turn to a neighbor and discuss our ideas before sharing them with the class.

We also used some of the books we had read. Flipping through the pages we looked for some of the facts we had heard read to us earlier.

As part of our writing program we created an Alphabox of facts about magnets. These facts, listed alphabetically, were used as prompts to help us brainstorm our thoughts before we wrote in our journals. Students were challenged to write two sentences telling us what they knew about magnets.

Magical Magnets

With the help of the magnet kids from the Burlington Science center we were able to do some hands on experimentation. Using magnets and a variety of materials we hypothesized if each item would stick to the magnet or not. Next we tested the items. Finally, we recorded our answers on individual graphs that charted magnetic and non-magnetic items.