Just a quick reminder that tonight is Science Night at Old Town Elementary School. It starts at 6 and goes until 7:30. Come have some fun and enjoy all the fun science exhibits!!

Today we put the workshop model into full swing! I really enjoyed being able to have a more personalized math lesson! I hope that the students enjoyed it as much as I did!

In reading, we read The Yellow Star and worked with foreshadowing. We had a chart where we recorded any phrases we thought would be considered foreshadowing and wrote why we thought the phrases were foreshadowing. We also wrote down how the phrase made us feel- interested, anxious, curious, made us wonder what was going to happen next, etc. They caught on really quickly and were pros in no time!!

In science, we finally started our sound kit that they have been so anxiously waiting for! We started the unit by creating a class KWL chart that I will post once the unit is over and the chart is complete! I was shocked at how much they already knew about sound and light and they had some great questions about things they wanted to know! We started an investigation today on light sources (I'll post pictures of them as soon as we are finished!) In the investigation we are including some key vocabulary words, our main source of light(sun), and other sources of light. They are looking good!!

Hope you all have a good night! :)

Day One Update

What a busy day we had today! We had art to start off the morning, then got right to work on writing! On Friday before vacation we started writing about The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg (Thanks to Mrs. Bagley!) The students each chose one picture to write about and and then developed a statement/opinion about the picture. After we stated our opinion about what was happening in the picture, students had to support their opinion with evidence from the picture. They could either support it by using a list, comparing or telling a story. To end the writing piece they had to write a short reflection that brought the whole piece back together. Today we worked on finishing up those writing pieces. 

Math was the main focal point of the day. We are starting to shift to the workshop model for our Everyday Math program. All this entails is changing teaching from a whole class to three smaller groups. This allows for students to get a better grasp on the content and more individualized lessons and attention. I'm excited to get it started, I've heard so many good things about it!!

Back to school!

Tomorrow we are back to school! I hope everyone had a great vacation!! As I said in the letter I sent home, this coming week will be my week on my own :) We have lots of stuff we need to cover this week- it's going to be busy, but fun!

We start our Foss sound kit this week, where we will be doing hands on experiments to learn about sound! We are also starting Unit 12 in math (our last unit!!) And of course there will be lots of reading and writing!

I will try and update as much as possible to keep you all informed on what we are up to :)!

Chris Van Allsburg

On Friday I had the opportunity to sub for my first time in 4th grade! We had such a good day together :) My favorite part of the day was our reading/writing portion. We had to combine them because we were short on time due to art! We continued our author study on Chris Van Allsburg by reading Two Bad Ants. We looked at a few different elements of the story: first of all we used our prior knowledge of ants to think about what different locations would look like to an ant. We determined that the perspective of our classroom would be very different if we were an ant because of the size difference between us and ants! I then explained that Allsburg uses very descriptive words in this book to give readers a visualization of where the ants are, but he never actually says the setting the ants are in. We first read the book without being able to see pictures, but we brainstormed as a class and with our neighbors about where the ants were on each page that was being described. After we finished the book we went through and looked at the pictures that went along with each description ( the students guesses were spot on almost every time!) After looking at the pictures we discussed what made his writing so descriptive and entertaining. The students then had the option of writing one of two writing assignments: They could either write a text to self connection that they thought of while reading the story, or they could choose a setting and describe it using any words they wanted besides the name of the place. I thought that they all did an awesome job! We saved time at the end of the lesson to make sure we could go back to the rug and share our wonderful writing :)