Team Up!!!

On Day 4 of Red Ribbon Week, Team Wilkinson "teamed up" against drugs.   Check out our fans...

                     Kenwood Tigers

      Twins, Boilermakers, Vipers, Colts

                          Excited Fan!

                          Cats!!!

                            Cards!!

      Hadley and Ms. Wilkinson were gameday ready...Beat the Noles!!!

Back at It!!!

Team Wilkinson is back in the swing of things after Fall Break!!   Look at us working hard on math today :)

Tiger Harriers

Congrats to our XC kiddos who braved the rain and cold this evening for their last home meet of the season...I am so proud of you!!!  

Roller Coaster Phase III

It's increasing in difficulty...so synergy is increasing in importance.  Fortunately, we are a team of leaders and are up to the challenge!!   Our engineers today took an extended time to construct their coaster, with many challenges and some successes.   Today 2 of 6 teams were able to successfuly build a coaster with our constraints.  We appreciated the assistance of Mrs. Roberts and Mrs. Brice today--their creative wisdom helped us work together on our task.  We are looking forward to tomorrow's custom track build! 

Day 3 - Thrill Ride: Design a freestanding rollercoaster for a marble to travel (without falling off) through 2 vertical loops, a corkscrew, and a 90 degree turn. 

Roller Coaster Phase II

Today our roller coaster engineers learned a tough lesson...sometimes bigger isn't better!! Our students had a very reflective conversation at the end of class today and I am excited to see how Wednesday's course will change as a result (pardon the pun!). Congrats to our 2 teams that successfully completed their design today.

 

Day 2 - Loop de Loop: Construct a freestanding roller coaster that does not use a human force to start, completes 2 vertical loops and ends with a marble jumping into a cup.

Donuts for All!!!

Thank you to our wonderful team moms who organized our Fall Festival pumpkin decoration for "If You Give a Dog a Donut"!!   We loved getting a chance to decorate our own donuts!

Kenwood Fall Festival is Thursday night from 6:00-8:00pm...come vote for our pumpkin!!! 

Roller Coaster Phase I

I speak for everyone on Team Wilkinson when I say...learning is fun!! Today was the kickoff to our much anticipated week---Roller Coaster Week! After reviewing our vocabulary, we put our kinds to work on our first task. Monday through Wednesday we'll complete activities with certain constraints to build our design schema...Thursday and Friday, we're on our own. Here's a look at our engineers at work...

 

Day 1: Jumping Marbles

Students will design a freestanding roller coaster that does not use a human force start and ends when the marble lands in a cup (after flying).

New Multiplication Strategies

Multiplication looks different from what we learned “back in the day”!   For those of you helping your student prepare for our upcoming unit test, here is a quick peak 2 of our strategies.  Students were also taught the Traditional Algorithm; but depending on their learning style, may prefer one of these new strategies when solving problems.  If you are interested in more on our new strategies, you can check out videos on the Partial Products Algorithm and Lattice Method here.  

 

Leaders of the Month

Team Wilkinson was honored at the Leadership Assembly on Wednesday in an impressive way...3 of our students were named "Leader of the Month"!!! All three have demonstrated our habits in wonderful ways!!

Nathan was nominated by Ms. Wilkinson,  Hadley by Mrs. Costello and Max by Mrs. Stoltz!!  

Congrats Team, we're very proud of you!!!

You Be the Teacher!!

As our multiplication unit draws to a close, we’d like to show you what we’ve learned! Today, Team Wilkinson took advantage of our iPads and recorded their own lesson through an app called ShowMe.  Take a look at how we would teach another Tiger how to multiply if we were the teacher!

 

ENJOY!!!! 

Lilly

Tommy

Nolan

Ty

Zach

Donovan

Elizabeth

Garrett

Caden

Matthew

Adelle

Abby

Max

Emily

Jeremy

Gavin

Reagan

Alyssa

Austin

Gavin

Nathan

Eva

Triniti

Magnets!

Yesterday, Team Wilkinson explored the power of magnets through a scavenger hunt.  We observed magnets of different strengths and their reactions with objects in our room---and each other.   We even observed the force between 2 magnets causing minor breakage as they flew together in attraction!!  

Some key vocabulary for our unit:

Magnet - an object that attracts certain metals (iron, cobalt and steel)

Attract - to pull closer together; opposite poles pull together (+-)

Repel - to push away; magnetic poles of like charge (++, --) will move away from each other 

Objects that were not made of certain metals had no reaction---they neither attracted nor repelled.  There was no force acting on either the magnet or the object because the object had no charge (objects we observed that did not react: paper, rubber, plastic).

Brain Break!!!

Team Wilkinson is working hard on closely reading informational texts for more understanding. Our concentration needed a bit of a break...so we were "Happy" to take a dance break :)

Making real-world connections...

We had quite an entertaining Literacy Block today…during our reading of the Circulatory system, a hailstorm hit!  Team Wilkinson rushed to the windows to check out the experience in the courtyard area and watched for several minutes as rain and hail flooded our grassy area.  Nolan’s mom was also intrigued and minutes later sent these photos of her home for us to check out.  How awesome that we can share our learning experiences through technology so easily!! 

 

Our next literacy and science units have us looking in depth at the weather, so this a great preview to our learning!

Text Structures

Today we headed to the library and Mrs. Dallaire taught us how to analyze the structure of a text and how an author's purpose is communicated through this choice. We will use this understanding to select the right structure for our expository piece on Body Systems later this month.

Fluency Partnerships

Team Wilkinson kicked off fluency practice last week with a great discussion of what it means to be a fluent reader. I was very impressed with the thoughtful, and detailed, observations they presented after a model of fluent and did fluent readings.

Check out our thinking:

 

On Monday, we received our first passage: The Human Heart.

After a whole group choral read, we were introduced to a new strategy: Peer Assisted Fluency. This partnership has us building a strong relationship with a peer and using their feedback to improve our habits. So far, Team Wilkinson is engaging in incredibly thoughtful and assistive discussion about our strengths and weaknesses as a reader.

Here's a peek of our work today: