We started our new Unit of Inquiry this week under the transdiciplinary theme: Sharing the Planet. Our Central Idea for this UOI is: Ecosystems rely on biodiversity to maintain the balance they require to thrive. We started off our new UOI by watching a few short videos about ecosystems to draw up any prior knowledge we had. We then used graffiti posters to write down what we already knew about ecosystems. Students then put the graffiti posters into jot notes and together as a class we summarized what we knew. During the summarizing process we realized we needed to do a bit of revising and editing in order to sort out our information. We color coded our answers to each question and posted our final summary of what we already know on the bulletin board. We also used graffiti posters to tune into what we already knew about our lines of inquiry and key concepts. After tuning into our big topic, ecosystems, we watched two BrainPOP movies and used our listening skills to listen for BIG WORDS. We recorded all of our BIG WORDS on the whiteboard so that we could research them to find out what they mean. We have a TON of BIG WORDS for this UOI so I suggest reviewing these words with your child at home and in their native language. To find out the meaning of all our big words, we had a quick mini lesson on the parts of a non-fiction book, students then looked through the books searching for their words in the Contents, Glossary and Index. In partners students wrote the definition for their word and then presented it to the class. We are all very excited to be learning about ecosystems!
In Math this week we reviewed our measuring skills and started looking at mental math strategies to solve subtraction questions. We are working on subtracting BIG numbers without using paper and pencil, and it’s tough! We have been practicing subtracting big numbers by breaking up these big numbers into smaller numbers and then subtracting, we call this Partitioning. We have also been practicing the strategy of Counting Back. Ask you child which mental math strategy they like to use and please practice with them!
