Knowles News: Super Powers, Science, Spiderman...a Busy Week!

Wow! This week has been very busy and also very exciting! We started a new reading unit called, Reading Super Powers. The kids are learning what "powers" they have that can help them read on their own. The first "power" we learned about is Pointer Power. We learned how good readers point under each word while they read, and they make their fingers hop to each word as they read. We used special witch fingers to help us practice Pointer Power as we read poems and songs that we already know.

Today was the most exciting day of all as readers, because we returned to our classroom from lunch recess and found evidence that Spiderman himself had made a visit to our classroom while we were outside for recess.

Dr. Cicotte even caught a glimpse of Spiderman and tried to stop him to ask what he was doing, but he coudn't catch him!

Spiderman even left us special Power Pointers to help us make our Pointer Power even stronger!

In science this week, we learned about the Engineering Design Cycle.

To practice the Engineering Design Process, the students were presented with a problem in which a little bear lived outside and was getting so hot because he didn't have any shelter or a forest nearby. Students worked with a partner to complete steps 1 through 4 of the engineering design cycle and decided to create shade structure prototypes for Mr. Bear. Next week, we will test our shade structures and redesign as necessary. This has been an awesome project for us!

To help us build our prototypes, we made some shadow observations outside. We went outside three times throughout the day and traced a partner's shadow. We observed how their shadows changed throughout the day. They were pretty excited to watch the shadows change!

During our library time this week, your children had the opportunity to explore robotics and practice coding with tablets. As you can imagine, this was a very popular activity!