Grinchy Adjectives

On the last day of school before winter break, we reviewed adjectives (words that describe nouns) and used the song "Mr.Grinch" to help us practice identifying them. (At some point, I read about a more elaborate version of this idea HERE, which helped spark the idea.) 

Anyway, we first pasted a picture of The Grinch from here into our Thoughtful Logs (as pictured below). Then we watched and listened to this video that played the song, along with the lyrics, to identify adjectives. 

For independent practice, we created the chart below to help us generate sentences beginning with nouns, so we could become familiar with adjectives as words which describe nouns. 

The requirement was to generate at least 10 simple sentences, but many of us had so much fun practicing that we ended up doing far more!

Ornamental Polygons

In math, we wrote used the properties of polygons to write polygon riddles and one day after school, McKenzie and Jaden came up with the idea to make them into ornaments for a holiday tree on our classroom door. Since it was their idea, they designed and created the trees, the snow,  the sign, and the name on the sign ("Ornamental Polygons"). When it was time to actually hang the ornaments, Mariah and Bailey came up with the idea to use yarn and actually hang them on the tree, so they took over hanging all the ornaments. Mariah also had the idea for the stars on top of the trees, so she made those as well.

For the ornaments, we wrote the riddles inside and the shape of the ornament is supposed to be the answer to the riddle. Some of the polygons some of us chose were really difficult to draw--especially the polygons with multiple pairs of parallel sides!

Festive Winter Surveys

In December, we created and conducted festive winter surveys as a mini math project for collecting and analyzing data since we were getting pretty excited about upcoming holiday events. First, we brainstormed possible survey topics with our partner. Then we chose a topic and came up with three possible choices for conducting the survey among our class. After we conducting the survey (which was quite a bit more complicated that we realized!), we used the results to create a bar graph and pie chart from chartmaker.mathwarehouse.com as visual representations of our findings. 

If you look carefully on the pie chart, you will notice we also began to learn a little bit about converting fractions to decimals and percents (but not securely, as that was not the main focus of the project).