Reading comprehension

This week Judit and Sara focused on writing, reading and understanding stories (both fiction and non fiction) and poetry including comprehension questions. They learned how to analyze poems and locate the purpose of the poem by identifying the details that determine what the author meant. We focused on Shel Silverstein and they found his way of writing quite humorous, we learned that he used inference very often in his poems and it was like we were solving a riddle. They came up with very creative conclusions and justified their ideas thoroughly. In an effort to develop their creative writing skills they had to pick one out of three story starters and imagine a plot, setting, characters and resolution. Jordi practiced counting up to twenty and he managed to recognize and produce new sounds and new words. We focused on the sounds h, j, k and n. We also did story telling using finger puppets and Jordi was really observant and was able to reproduce the story immediately after hearing it once. Sergi focused on coloring the letters a, b and c and got familiar with their shape and also practiced basic handwriting with geometric shapes.

In science with Judit and Sara we learned about the population, volcanoes and chemical reactions. We did two experiments so they could visualize and better understand scientific concepts such as chemical changes. We turned milk into plastic by adding vinegar, and we learned that adding an acid, such as vinegar, to the milk changes the pH of the milk and makes the casein molecules unfold. We also learned that this chemical change was irreversible.

In maths the girls practiced adding and subtracting fractions, they found out that the tricky part was when you add or subtract fractions that have different denominators. They used visual models of fractions so that they could think through pictures. Moreover, they found factors a little bit easier and more fun than fractions, they learned that one number can have many factors and factors are the numbers we can multiply together to get another number. We ended the week by reading the history of chocolate and Milton Hershey, the man who founded the Hershey chocolate company and the company town of Hershey. The girls learned new words like 'apprentice', 'expand', 'afford' and 'refreshment' and they understood the difference between common and proper nouns.