Ms. Hartshorn’s Classroom News

February 8, 2008

Dear Families,

Happy 102^nd day of school! We celebrated our 100^th day of school on Wednesday this week. One child said, "Hey, wait a minute! I think yesterday was the 100^th day and now it’s a trick to get us to come to school an extra day, so that would be 181 days!" I assured him that it wasn’t a trick, and that we couldn’t count Tuesday, since that wasn’t a school day due to poor road conditions. Although, I do think he was disappointed when he realized that the day has to be made up in June, so we get 180 days in all. We had fun sharing our collections of 100 items, finding ways to organize them, regroup them, count them, and categorize them. We made crowns and goggles for the 100^th day. We timed 100 seconds to see how many jumping jacks we could do, how many stars we could write on a paper, and how many times we naturally breath before 100 seconds is up. Other 100-day activities included drawing self portraits on 100 dollar bills (in place of Ben Franklin’s face) and writing about what he or she would buy with $100. One child said, "That’s kind of hard because I don’t know what things really cost." We also drew full body self portraits of what we think we will look like when we’ve lived for 100 years. These portraits are just adorable—filled with gray hair, balding heads, walking canes, and wrinkles. They wrote about what they think they will accomplish in their lives by the time they reach their senior years. One child is planning to create a Japanese baseball team called the Japan Blue Sox! Everyone in math used candy hearts to estimate the number in a large bag, count out 100 very carefully and accurately, and then find several ways to make even groups or fair shares of the 100 candy hearts. This was work that second graders remember as finding multiples of a number, where 100 could be evenly distributed into groups of 2, 5, 10, 20, 25, 50, but not 3, or 4, etc. because then there would be some left over, or a remainder.

Yesterday marked the beginning of this year’s Chinese New Year. It is a 15-day celebration. It is the year of the Rat. During the end of this week and next week we will learn about several Chinese New Year traditions and work on some activities I have planned.

Learning Buddies: Your child may have told you that we began working with fifth and sixth graders in Ms. Baker’s class every other Thursday. We are spending this time reading to each other, working on science experiments, etc. We are looking forward to our time with them again next week—Valentines’ Day!

Homework: I told the kids that they have the reading homework assignment for the next two weeks—up until February 21^st, and then we will take a two or three week vacation from the reading homework for everyone. They were quite pleased with this, and said they would all do their best to work on the reading homework for the next two weeks. Yeah! Thank you for helping with this at home. I’m noticing a positive change in both fluency and comprehension for many children.

Four Winds: Incisors, canines and molars are all what? Yes, teeth, and each one has a specific way of tearing, chewing or gnawing food, and help us determine if an animal is more apt to be prey, predator, or both. The types of teeth an animals has also helps us determine what type of diet it eats. This lesson, "Teeth and Skulls," follows the last lesson about prey and predator, and reminds us that animals are either carnivores, herbivores, omnivores, or insectivores. We did a little experiment with the help of Mrs. Mead (Ciara’s Mom) and Mrs. Magill (Erin’s Mom) by eating a raw carrot and then eating popcorn, while identifying which teeth we were using for each one. It took some concentration to focus on which teeth were helping us do which type of jobs—chomping, biting, tearing, munching, chewing, etc. It was a bit tricky for those of us who have either missing teeth or loose, wiggly teeth, but with some discussion, we came to some conclusions. Incisors, the front teeth, are usually sharp and thin and good for cutting. Canines are usually pointy triangles, and are good for piercing or tearing the flesh of prey. Molars are the back teeth that are usually thick and flat-topped, and aid in the grinding of the food. We were able to investigate several different skulls and their jaws. We worked like detectives trying to determine what type of teeth they had, and then made predictions about what we thought each animal ate. We had great fun trying to guess the animal of each skull. We discovered that some animals actually had very sharp and pointy molars, rather than more flat ones.

Enjoy the photos: