What is a polygon?

For our morning journal this morning the students responded to, "If you could be famous for anything, what would you be famous for and why would you choose that?" On morning math we looked at creating a bar graph, estimating sums, place value, and multi-step addition and subtraction problem.

We did not have specials today, so we began our science shadow experiment. We went outside to the bus parking lot and had a student stand in the middle of the class and we traced her shadow. We looked at the direction of the sun and how her shadow formed from her body. We also measured the shadow. We did this two more times throughout the day and analyzed our results. We read our new Time for Kids about the upcoming election and focused on Martin Luther King Jr. day. Tomorrow and Tuesday we will look more into the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and everything he did for our country.

Today we learned the three rules for polygons. Rule #1: MUST have straight lines. Rule #2: MUST be closed. Rule #3: NO curves. We practiced looking at some examples and some non-examples of polygons. The students were able to figure out the rules on their own! Everyone played a game with polygons on aaamath.com (an excellent review site that covers all of our concepts) and practiced the concepts in their book.

We looked at more aspects of our story this week by sequencing events from the story using our time order words, characterization, author's purpose, and inferencing. The students continued to add to their own folktales and will finish this story over the next week.

We continued our shadow experiment and the students discovered that the shadows moved around like the hands on a clock. We saw how the higher the sun was in the sky, the shorter our shadow. Tomorrow, we will place a pencil on a sheet of paper and track the movement of the sun, every hour of the day. This will allow us to see just how the Earth moves throughout the day.

Tomorrow we will take the morning math test, Imagine It test, and our timed multiplication test. Please look for all of these to come home in Friday Folders. The coordinate grids and light tests will also come home in their Friday Folders.