We are Authors!

If you recall in the month of October, your child came home one day with a sticker that said, "Ask me about the book I'm writing!"

As part of our Writer's Workshop, and because I had been introduced to an amazing classroom publishing company called Student Treasures that transforms students into published authors, we dove right in to the whole writing process. Rough drafts, illustrations, everything that goes into writing a book was covered in our writing block and we couldn't wait to receive our final, published copy. Well...they came in this past week and to celebrate we had a special Author's Tea and Book Signing.

As a special treat, I created a video so that you can see your student autographing our classroom book.

If you missed out on the chance to order your own copy of our classroom book, contact me and we'll get you an order form.

Blog Blast

Due to the lack of recent blog posts one might think that we're still on Fall Break, but that would be entirely untrue. Our class has been B-U-S-Y, busy! So in an attempt to catch you up to date on some things we've been up to over the past four weeks, I've decided to give you a blog blast. Here are five amazingly, awesome events that have taken place in our classroom:

1. We had a new reader of the week! (It's actually a reader of every two weeks because we trade off with another grade, but nonetheless it's a pretty cool reward to receive!)

Mr. Diego!!
This guy loves to read books about weather!

2. We are learning how to type our spelling words in a Word document! This is helping us learn and practice our spelling words and it is also teaching the students excellent computer skills that they will need later on in the upper grades. 

3. The iPads!! We have used the iPads in our math station rotation (their favorite app is Sushi Monster which is helping them to become quick and fluent in their math facts). We have used the iPads in our literacy station rotation (our high school librarian, Mrs. White, tapped in on THE best online library app called EPIC and it lives up to its name!). We have also used the iPads as a spelling station to help us with our weekly spelling lists! The opportunities to utilize the iPads in our classroom seem to be limitless and the students absolutely LOVE when it is their turn to learn with the iPads!

 4. We developed our Writer's Workshop rubric which is basically a way for the students to be able to grade or assess their own writing and it gives them a goal to shoot for. To help the students first understand what a rubric was, we discussed ways we could "grade" the appearance of our desks and made charts of characteristics of a Clean Desk (or a 3 star desk), a Pretty Clean Desk (a 2 star desk), and a Not So Clean Desk (a 1 star desk). Then the students went back to their desks and did their best to make their desks look like a 3 star desk.

P.S. It helped that we did this project the day before Parent Teacher Conferences!

 After creating a rubric to grade our desks, we then transitioned to a rubric for our writing and the students were better able to understand the purpose of a writing rubric. Take a look at the students discussing and then the examples they rated so that they would know what an A writing piece would look like (or a 4 star), a B writing piece (or a 3 star) and so on..

5. Our classroom pet for a week - the jellyfish! You can't see him in this picture, but trust me...he's in there!

Two weeks ago our story of the week was Jellies: The Life of a Jellyfish and the students enjoyed sharing what they already knew about jellyfish and then recording what they had learned. The sweetest moment that week was our "jelly group" time. Here are some pics of the students researching jellyfish in their jelly group time...

And now you can consider yourself blog blasted! Whew! It has been a crazy few weeks since returning from Fall Break and here we are already two weeks away from Thanksgiving Break. Have a great weekend and keep on encouraging your children to read and practice their math facts!