Won't You Be My Valentine?

Our class is one big family. Like most families, we love to celebrate and Valentine's Day gave us reason to do just that!

Thank you to all the parents and family members who volunteered to bring in plates, napkins, Capri Sun drinks, cookies, candy, donuts, and CUPCAKES! You guys really know the way to Mrs. Wright's heart! Also, your children have THE. BIGGEST. HEARTS. And I'm confident that they have learned how to love from you. They showered me with chocolates, darling My Little Pony and Marvel Superhero Valentine's cards and sweet hand-written notes. Thank you from the very tip of my toes to the top of this blonde head. 

We had such a fun time celebrating that the only picture I was able to sneak in was from our special breakfast together. 

 This sweet gem spoiled us with the good donuts. Three cheers for Krispy Kreme!

Great Minds Think Alike

Before Christmas Break...Wow! That seems so long ago and yet Spring Break is right around the corner already. Okay, let's start this again...

Before Christmas Break our class was learning about place value and base ten form. To introduce the unit I decided to challenge them, in their small groups, to figure out how many hundreds make 1,000. Each table group was given ten blank hundreds charts and simply told to create 1,000 X's. Here's a look at what happened next:

 I love how this picture shows how well they all worked as a team!

It was so much fun to watch how every group had come up with a different strategy for creating 1,000 X's. One group kept passing a hundred chart around their table with each student marking an X and then passing the chart on to the next student, while another group divided the ten hundreds charts evenly to each student. One group thought it was impossible because...

"Mrs. Wright, ten hundreds charts make ten hundred. We CAN'T make 1,000. 

We can only make ten hundred."

It took some groups a little longer than others, but the outcome was genius! 

Ten hundreds make 1,000!

We're Living Like Pilgrims

As promised, here is a snippet from our days prior to Thanksgiving Break which will from now on will be known as Pilgrim Days! 

 

Our week began with a special visit from our dear friend Mrs. Tumney who retired last year from her position as Lena Dunn's sweet and helpful librarian. Mrs. Tumney came and read a Thanksgiving story to the class that really made us use our predicting skills. 

Our class also took a virtual field trip to Plimoth Plantation in Plymoth, Massachusetts. During our Science/Social Studies block throughout the month of November, we had spent our time learning all about the pilgrims' voyage from England to America. We learned that there were actually two ships that left the England harbor (the Mayflower and the Speedwell) and that the Pilgrims had to spend two months aboard the Mayflower - oh and we also learned what a chamber pot was used for! The students even graphed the weather at Plimoth Plantation verses the weather in our own hometown of Washington for our field trip day. I'm telling you, we packed it all in!

The day of the field trip, the students were given tickets to board the Mayflower and boy were they excited! They listened intently as we learned what life was like for the pilgrims at Plimoth Plantation in 1627. The sweet little "pilgrims" took notes and then we broke into small groups to discuss new things they had learned. 

Next, we got to shaking and made some homemade butter (hence the recipe cards your student brought home that day) and tasted it on some crackers. Each student was allowed to record on a chart whether or not he/she liked the butter and then we graphed our results during our math block.

Our day ended with pilgrim games that are believed to have been played by pilgrim children such as tic-tac-toe, a form of hula-hoop, ring toss, and riddles. I leave you with some fun pictures of the "pilgrims" in action...

I hope your family had a fabulous Thanksgiving Break and are enjoying the anticipation that the Christmas season brings!

We're in the Double Digits!

Over the last month, our class has ROCKED in math! We have covered two digit addition and are currently mastering two digit subtraction with and without regrouping. As always, I feel like the students grasp ideas better when we can use our hands, so to help them out with the concept of two digits we used work mats. For several days in a row, we utilized the math work mats which encouraged the students to physically carry the digit/number tile over to the tens place when adding two digit numbers like 43+29. They really enjoy learning in partner groups and I love when they work in pairs because they get to demonstrate understanding, cooperatively correct one another, and re-teach by explaining their reasoning to their peers. In the end, learning concepts like two digit addition and subtraction becomes concrete for the students and the whole time they are having fun!

Also, before we took a break for Thanksgiving, we covered a story in our reading books called Ah, Music! We spent the week studying vocabulary words like vibration, volume, performance, tune, and concentrate. At the end of the week, we were privileged to have Mr. Wright as our special guest who brought in instruments such as a guitar, a snare drum, and maracas to illustrate the week's vocab words. When all was said and done we not only knew our vocabulary words, but we also walked away with a new tid bit of knowledge: the snare drum is the loudest non-amplified (meaning you don't have to plug it in) instrument. 

Stay tuned for the next post which will highlight our classroom's Pilgrim Day!

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!

iLearn with iPads!

I hope that by now you have heard about our class' amazing gift we received through the generosity of some fantastic donors - 4 iPad minis! The class had no idea I had applied for this project through an organization called Donors Choose and as you will see, they were super surprised! Watch the gift reveal here.

Obviously, the addition of the iPads to our classroom has been warmly welcomed by the students. They have enjoyed being able to access our online reading program Raz-Kids on them, as well as play a phonics Bingo game on them during our morning Literacy Stations. 

But that's not all, the iPads are also a part of our daily math station rotation and every week each student is allowed to utilize the iPads to assist them in learning their math facts. These little gems of technology are an amazing asset to today's education and learning, and we are super thankful to have them as a part of our classroom!

And the countdown continues - seven days until Fall Break!