The Cooper School Daily

Building Hives & Volleyball Skills!

Hive_picScience

This week students learned all about the honeybee’s hive. First, they discovered that there are three different uses of cells within the hive. The bottom of the hive contains the brood cells where the queen lays her eggs. Next, come the cells where the bees store pollen. Finally, come the cells where bees make and store the honey. During centers students carefully measured colored strips of paper and created hexagonal cells, which were then formed into a model hive.

Volleyball

Over the past few weeks, 4th and 5thgraders have been learning the basics of volleyball during Movement. On Wednesday, the two classes headed to Isle of Palms to try their hand at playing with a net. The trip was a huge success! We discovered that playing a real game is challenging, yet tons of fun. We will be going on two more of these study trips this trimester.

volleyball_picReading

We continued our study of Kate DiCamillo this week during Reading Workshop. Last week, students finished reading “Because of Winn Dixie”. This week each student chose a new Kate DiCamillo novel to begin reading. On Monday, we discussed how a reader decides how much to read each day if given one school week to finish a book. This proved to be as much of a math lesson as it was a lesson in good reading! After planning out our reading goals for the week, students focused on habits of good readers such as making predictions and summarizing the story.