As I sit here and look out my window on an April morning, I am astounded to see snow! Ahh, springtime in Ohio! I'm so grateful that Mrs. Walther is such a firm believer in getting our kids outside; they had a fabulous time visiting Centennial Park this week, despite the less than perfect weather. I can't wait to read the Voices in the Field posts to learn about what was seen and done during this trip! ELA UPDATE We have spent quite a bit of time learning about point of view and perspective in writing. Along with this topic, came the introduction of first-hand and second-hand accounts. Students have read books and articles that show different people's perspective of the same event, as well as discussed how writing in the first vs third person point of view can change the telling of a story, and the reader's understanding of it. We have also spent the last couple of weeks working on some test prep. My goal was to expose the kids to as many different types of questions as they might see on the AIR test next week. One of the articles we read as part of our test prep was about the State Quarters and Beautiful Parks coin programs. I pulled out my collections of each of these coin programs, and the kids were intrigued! Thanks so Steve, we were able to complete our State Quarters collection, which students have been working on for over 5 years here at Harman! And many students have brought in Beautiful Parks coins to get that collection started. What a great way to learn about our states and parks! SOCIAL STUDIES UPDATE
Inventors from Ohio were the topic of discussion in SS, as we learned about Thomas Edison, Garret Morgan, Charles Kettering, James Spangler, Granville Woods, Charles Richter, and, of course, the Wright Brothers. We are now into our last SS unit, Economics. Students have learned about the Factors of Production, which we will see in action at our Cassano's field trip in May. We have moved on to learning about savings and budgets. Entrepreneurship is one of the key topics of this unit, and children will get first hand practice with this later this year. On April 25, we will kick off our Market Day project...keep your eyes and ears open for info about this to come home that week! Field trip projects are coming in as well. We have learned about the Underground Railroad in Springboro, the Underground Museum in Cincinnati, Serpent Mound, the Wright Cycle Shop, the Amish, Cincinnati....with much more to come! Students eagerly await each new project and are enjoying learning about all these great places and the fascinating history of Ohio. OPERATION HILLSIDE UPDATE Students are at the synthesis point with this project. They have spent months researching and learning from experts, now it's time to put all that learning together to create a cohesive plan. On Friday, student teams spent time together going through what they have learned and pulling out the big ideas that were important for them to include in their proposals. Opinion pieces will be written in ELA class in the upcoming weeks, and models of the hillside will be created in math/science classes.
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AuthorAnne Kenney Archives
May 2016
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