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Squeezing in more learning

9/25/2013

Despite another shortened day, the children managed to accomplish quite a bit!
Station Work-
Divergent Thinking: We had a great time with our collaborative problem solving task--Creating a Trap for a Criminal! The kids loved how it went with our law unit! They are really working better on their collaboration skills! Their presentations of the traps were incredibly creative.
Convergent Thinking: We challenged ourselves with a Directive Detective and a couple of logic puzzles. The puzzles keep getting harder, but the kids are keeping up!

Novel Study:
The kids were SO excited to get their own copies of Theodore Boone-Kid Lawyer! We worked on some in-depth evaluative questions about the novel, previewed some important vocabulary and are ready to dive right into the book next week!

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Game show & Talk Show Day

9/19/2013

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Our day started with Stations:
Convergent thinking-logic puzzles continue to build these important critical thinking skills.
Divergent/Evaluative Thinking-The students used their critical thinking skills to rank their list of favorite activities (Way to build fluency!). They had to justify their list ranking by using a criteria chart to compile information about their items. This is very good practice to situations that may come up in life or work when making difficult decisions.
Divergent Thinking: We played Jeopardy in a small group. The students really got to work on their fluency by coming up with as many "Questions" as possible given a certain answer like "Unbelievable". Some responses were: "What is a dinosaur in my classroom?" "What are 15 clowns getting out of one car?"

Our algebraic thinking skills got a workout with a lesson from Level 2 of our Hands-On-Equations program. Here is an example of an equation the kids can solve now: 3* - * = * + 9 (* is a variable and represents the opposite of x).

Our Focus study of Law turned into a discussion that rivaled the best of any news channel talk show. We talked about government types, which was a VERY spirited conversation involving many interesting questions and answers. Excellent job!

HW: Finish Station Work

Looking forward to next week,
Mrs. Kraeger

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Creativity Culture

9/11/2013

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We enjoyed a wonderful creative problem solving task today during our stations! It was a collaborative STEM activity where the children had to design, build, and present a futuristic toy. Their ideas were full of innovation and fun!

Their convergent and critical thinking continue to grow as they tackle difficult puzzles that stretch their brains!

We continued our focus study of law with some research on types of governments. Some of the terms are pretty challenging, and will require more research. I can't wait to discuss what we found out about this topic!

HW: 1. Government Types Research- hypothesis and simple definition for each term.
2. Finish any Station work (logic puzzles, or elaboration activity) that is undone.

Looking forward to seeing these creative kids next week,
Mrs. Kraeger

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Thinking abounds!

9/5/2013

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We had a jam-packed day in Target this week! We started off with logic puzzles and creative problem solving to work on our divergent & convergent thinking. The kids were really challenged by the "Directive Detective" puzzle that we solved. The directions are very complicated, so it's great practice for logical thinking and following directions!

We also worked on transformations with pictures of law/legal symbols. Your children are a highly creative bunch! This was followed by a game called DiCon. The kids start with a word, we used judge. Then they have 3 minutes to think of as many divergent words as they can to do with judge. After that, they have 1 minute to think of words that converge back to the word judge. Not as easy as it sounds--ask your child!

The children worked on collaboration and creativity by writing a writing a group story using several law words. Some of the stories were quite humorous!

Our novel study, Theodore Boone, continued. We're getting to some really exciting parts of the story and learning some interesting things about law too!

HW: Finish any station work that was incomplete.

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Squeezing in more learning

Game show & Talk Show Day

Creativity Culture

Thinking abounds!

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