Valentine Art

Even though it's a few weeks until Valentine's Day I decided to go ahead and do something now. Arts and Tarts is early this year (March 3rd - mark your calendars) and I didn't think we would have time for this in the upcoming weeks. Last week we painted our papers and this week we traced hearts on the back and then cut them out.

Once they were cut out, we glued them onto a piece of paper and then glittered them. I love glitter! (I don't know if the janitor shares my enthusiasm).

Some finished work which we will hang in the hallway for a few weeks. Come by and check them out!

It is that time of the year where I allow the students to start to take our class books home. They are all books that we have created together and they have been looking forward to sharing them with you for months. I make them wait until after Christmas so that we have enough for everyone. Keep the books for a week and then send them back so that your student can take home a new one to share with you! I hope you enjoy them as much as we did making them!

Battle of the Books!

This week we did not have reading skill time due to DIBEL testing so the students and I decided to have a Battle of the Books. We chose 9 books from our reading series, divided up into teams and then got busy reading! Here are some the books the students read:

These two chose to buddy read one of the stories.

Some found lying down to be the most comfortable position for reading.

Other groups read the stories together with everyone taking a turn reading a page.

Today was the big day. We battled it out with fierce questions and quickfire answers and one group emerged victorious. Congrats to BG, TVN, SY and NH who won and then shared their plunder with everyone!

Snowmen Stories

We started a new class book today about snowmen. The students had to decorate their snowmen and then fill in a graphic organizer about what things on their snowman they are going to describe in a written paragraph.

This is BZ's finished snowman along with her graphic organizer. Tomorrow we will turn these ideas into sentences and make our paragraphs!

I also passed out our book charms to the students who completed their monthly reading log. (It looks like some of you lost yours!) TVN also earned a book charm.

On Monday we welcomed a new student into our classroom. AG transferred to Sherwood from Lincoln and we are very glad to have her in our classroom!

Number Corner

This month in Number Corner we are reviewing as well as learning some new things. Each day we spend about 15-20 minutes at the carpet working on different math skills in a fun way. One of things we do is draw out 10 magnetic tiles from a cup and then write fractions to show what was pulled out. CG is writing the fractions below.
TVN is working on sorting numbers into even or odd.

After TVN was finished, SY took those same numbers and placed them in order from least to greatest.

We have a very challenging pattern this month on our calendar. Can you figure it out?

We had the promethean board in our room this week and we used it every day to practice even more math skills. We did a lot of clock work, place value and money. This month we have also started to add 2-digit numbers with regrouping (carrying). Below KW is working on the promethean board. Come in and see how it works for yourself!

Catching Up!

December was such a busy month both at work and home that I quickly got behind on my blog posts. I want to catch everyone up with some of the things that have happened in our room! We had an assembly and 6 students received an award for Caring behavior. (not pictured is CB)

Mrs. Monkman also came to our classroom and handed out awards and book charms to students who had turned in their reading logs for the month of November.

Mrs. Campbell and I have been sharing a promethean board that is wheeled between our classrooms. A promethean board is an interactive whiteboard that the students can write on, draw on, color on, etc. It is very cool and we are excited because we will be getting one around February thanks to our special friend Mrs. S!

RH is practicing writing a fact family.

HS rolled the dice and then rounded the number to the nearest 10.

In December we had a couple Star of the Weeks. Here is JW with his poster and HS is right below him.

We had received letters from our pen pals which is always exciting! The students shared their letters with friends and reread them again and again. Some like TT wanted to start writing back to their pen pals as soon as possible!

Before our Christmas concert I did get some pictures of how nice everyone looked. Both boys...

and girls!
Unfortunetly none of my pictures during the concert turned out. They were all blurry. The students did a great job singing though and I loved hearing all their songs!