100 Days SMARTER!

What a great day of learning, February 2nd was! It's hard to believe we are 100 days (105 now) into our school year! 

Camryn made this sign at home and it was a great addition over our door!

Mrs. Smith and I rocking our 100 shirts! She had a 100 day puzzle. Izzy guessed correctly that it was hot air balloons. My shirt was an addition to my Halloween I-Spy shirt! 

Kids worked in groups to try and build structures with 50 marshmallows and 50 toothpicks! 

They also made hidden 100 pictures. Can you find the numbers for 100? 

Here's to the next 69 days of amazing learning!

Patterns of the Sun

We began studying space in science. We first started by learning about patterns of the Sun. We made Sun Trackers or Sun Dials and learned how they can help us tell the time of day. We went out three different times and pointed our plates to the north. We saw, throughout the day, the shadows were in different places. We later looked at how those places were in the same places as the hour hand on a clock! 

10:45 AM -Pretend the N is the 12 on a clock. :) 

12:20 PM 

2:40 PM 

They were so excited to see how the earth was turning throughout the day to make the sun look as if it was moving! 

We are now learning about patterns of the moon! 

Shared Reading with Mrs. Smith

Students began by reading Tuesday by David Wiesner. It is a wordless book. Students then worked with a partner to add narration to the pages with post-its. They were all SO engaged! 

Mrs. Smith then turned all the pages into a class book. It was a great way to make predictions about what we thought the the characters were saying! 

First Week Back Together

In the midst of a new year, much of our first week back together was spent reviewing classroom procedures and getting back into the swing of school. At times, it seemed as though the classroom buzzed with a new type of energy - one that felt as though all learners were rested and ready to explore something new. This was especially evident during our math time, where students thought of strategies to organize materials using strategies such as skip counting (ex. 2, 4, 6..), grouping by landmark numbers (ex. By 10s), grouping by type, and using tally symbols. There was so much to celebrate as students got to share with the rest of the class some of their strategies. Please check out the classroom Twitter if you are interested in seeing some of this thinking!

Highlights from our week together:

1. Students reconnected with friends and shared stories from winter break

2. Students worked together to organize classroom supplies and talked about counting strategies

3. We started a classroom read aloud "The Mouse and the Motorcyle" by Beverly Cleary - I believe it will soon become a classroom favorite!

4. We compared two similar stories ("The Little Red Hen" and "The Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza"), talking about story elements such as character, setting, events, problem, and solution 

5. We gained a new CPS animal, and learned all about wolves

6. We wrote thank you notes to a friend or family member and talked about the "unique-ness" of such a type of note

As always, it was such a joy to teach and learn alongside your child this week. Thank you again for sharing them with us!

Welcome 2016

It's hard to believe it's already 2016 and half way through our year! They have all grown and learned so much. I'm so excited to have Mrs. Elizabeth Smith join our classroom family as our student teacher. She is passionate, caring, organized, determined and so much more! This will be a fabulous second half of the year! Check back soon for more...

We always need more time

As I look to see my last post was September 17 (!), I think if I had more time I would have posted more. While they may be true, there are always reasons for not doing something! With help from Mrs Smith, our student teacher, I am going to work to keep this updated! It will be great to look back at the end of the year(s) and see how much we learned. Here's to 2016 and the start of new and great beginnings!

Reading Strategies

We worked this week on learning strategies good readers can use, when they come to a tricky word. Here is our list, with gestures of course! **Notice it doesn't say sound it out?!! 😃**