Busy, Busy Little Bees!

Yikes! The new year is flying by and I can hardly keep up! Last week was a blur between my getting the flu and the students getting back into the routine of school. This week has been a little better with lots of stuff going on. In between all the testing (DIBELS, Dolch words, District Math Assessment #2) we have been having a lot of fun.

We have been working on creating our own story problems. First we make the pictures and then we write a math story problem to go with them. Here is KB with her picture:

Here SH is adding more presents to hers.

AL is adding more details to make his picture interesting.

BK is carefully gluing her presents into place.

LT carefully takes his time while he is coloring to make sure that his picture is nice to look at. He wants a lot of people to solve his problem and a nice-looking story problem will attract more people than a sloppy one.

When we arrived back from Christmas vacation we found the laptops had come to visit us! The students each have a laptop on their desks for the month of January and we have been busy using them. Here we used them during our spelling lesson. The students listened to the words used in sentences, practiced writing them and then played a few games with them on spellingcity.com.

A writing project that we have been working on is our Mixed-Up Snowmen. We decorated a snowman and then used a graphic organizer to help us write down adjectives that describe what they looked like. We then used our graphic organizer and wrote a descriptive paragraph on the belly of the snowman. Once everyone is finished I will cut apart the top and the bottom of the snowmen and mix them all up. The students will have to read the descriptive paragraph in order to figure out which top goes with which bottom. It quickly becomes a favorite class book.

Here CT is working on his paragraph.

SM is starting her paragraph also.

Here a few finished snowmen before they are cut apart:

Today we started our pen pal letters and we are typing them on our laptops. The students all of a sudden have so much to say! They are very excited to write on the computers and ask me everyday if they can do so. I always sigh and say "Ok, if all you really want to do is write then I guess I'll put away the art supplies."

They always choose to write!