Empathy

We began our day with a focus on word study for morning choice again this week. What word study activity did your kiddo do? Then, after Art, in our meeting, we shared one word about our weekend. Do you think your child said: fun, terrible, sleepover, sports or boring? After our one word, we discussed our basic needs and then watched 2 videos about children in poverty. We are going to focus on EMPATHY this week so we discussed what empathy means and then I shared a story about a student from last year. It's one thing to see the children in Africa and have empathy but it's another thing to realize that there are kiddos in our school that don't have their basic needs met. Also, they received a chart for Random Acts of Kindness. After about 10 minutes, some said they were finished. So, we had another discussion that acts of kindness are only random when they happen out of the blue. They need to do things because they empathize with someone-not just to check something off their list. In The Beaded Moccasins, Mary made it to Sequin's trading post on Lake Erie and dodged a bullet when she said she couldn't read the treaty because it was in French! Phew! After reading independently, we worked with identifying figurative language in song lyrics. I challenged them to try and find more when listening to music because we didn't do very well with this today. We also did some free-writing and writing poetry for our POETree. :) It was a very cold outdoor recess with big snow flakes and in quiet time, they should have completed their Math 4 Today. However, some are choosing to work on it at home this week so you might want to ask them if they've finished. In Math Workshop, we started our decimal learning by placing fractions and decimals on a number line. This proved to be pretty challenging for some. Unfortunately, we just want to be told what to do instead of trying to solve and figure it out on their own. They aren't enjoying having to think... I stopped them about half way through and gave a little more explanation about decimals and their places and values. This helped a lot of them to finish putting the numbers on the number line. Today was only day 1 and they don't realize that they don't need to know it all right away! (Needless to say, it was a bit stressful...) We ended our day with Science. I gave them 2 probes (thought provoking questions) that dealt with heat vs. temperature. We really want to know the answers, too, so we created experiments to do tomorrow to figure them out! One was the mitten problem and the other was the temperature of objects--what does your child think?