Energy: Heat

We continued to compare different forms of energy against sound energy, and this week our focus was heat energy! We had a lot of fun talking about friction and natural vs. man-made heat sources. The kids loved our science experiments for the week...

Our test items were hershey's kisses and they thought it was the greatest thing ever that I needed to time them to see how long it takes a hershey kiss to melt in their mouths! :)

We also melted them in our hands and got REAL messy... (thank goodness for baby wipes!)

And our final round was Ms. Ham using the hair dryer to melt one hershey kiss...

(I did take the foil off before- don't worry! ha!)

We found that our body heat melts it the fastest because our mouths melted them MUCH quicker than our hands or the hair dryer.

We also started using interactive charts in addition to our writing block and since our whole day is about heat energy, we wrote about heat we can feel...

It breaks down like this:

Day 1: We each come up with a sentence to add to our chart paper.

Day 2: We read the chart, find sight words, digraphs, etc.

Day 3: I write a few of the sentences on sentence strips and kids get a word and they have to put the sentence in order.

(Despite their faces, they LOVE this and it's great fluency and sentence mechanics practice.)

Day 4: Each student gets their own sentence typed and cut into pieces to put together.

Day 5: Each student glues their sentence to a piece of paper and illustrates the sentence and writes underneath the typed sentence. I put the pages together into our class book and brag about our published book! :)

The other big news in our classroom is that we have new math centers that we are IN LOVE with. I can't make copies of these games fast enough...

They are all partner, counting and cardinality, dice games and it is really fun to listen to them strategize and gain fluency.

Ask Your Child About:

-Writing: Interactive charts! What was their sentence for our chart? (I can feel....)

-Content Connection: Can you name 2 man-made heat sources? 2 natural heat sources? What is it called when we rub our hands together and it gets warm? (friction)

-Phonics: We reviewed digraphs and began focusing and introduced letter combinations. What sound does "ph" make? We also have been working on decoding a lot whole group because they're all pro's at encoding!

-Reading: Identify main idea and key details, unknown words. What do we picture when we're retelling a story with key details? (A WEINER DOG! The head is the beginning, the long belly is the middle, and the tail is the end). Can you retell the story, "Blackout"?

-Math: Measurement. What are the three ways we learned how to measure something and the motions that go with them? (Length, Height, & Weight)

I hope you had a wonderful weekend!

With SO much love,

Ms. Ham