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!

Science ROCKS!!!

I have been so busy taking pictures of all the fun things we have been doing that I haven't had a chance to post them so you can see all the action! Here are a few (hundred) of them.

We have worked on our own as well as with partners. One of the partner activities that we have done, has been to put two things into a circle and your partner has to guess what property they share.

We have also worked on building towers using different materials and boy was that fun! I loved watching the children discover what worked for making things go higher and what didn't.
There were a lot of intent expressions and serious thoughts taking place.

Some students decided it might be a good idea to combine their materials.

I don't know who is enjoying this science unit more - me or the students!

Make way for Technology!

Don't Forget! November Reading Logs are due by Friday and I am sending home December ones today!

What a wonderful Tuesday! We had such a fun and exciting day doing all sorts of new things. In the morning we connected with our 2nd grade pen pals at McKay in a whole new way. Mrs. Schimel and I are experimenting with some new technology and with it, we are able to connect our two smart boards and computers so that our two classrooms are seeing and working on the same flipchart together. We can see them move things around and then we can use our pen and tools to move things around too. The students were convinced it was some form of magic!

Here is a flipchart we were working on together - Making Money. We would take turns pulling coins out of the box and then the other class would count the money and write the amount. It was so much fun!

KB is laughing because she can't believe that they can see what she is doing.

If you look closely you can see the pen is above the dime and they (our pen pals) are using it to draw the touch points before the count the money. Amazing! We had to stop for recess but we will most definitely be doing this kind of thing again. Way to go Pen Pals!

Also in the morning, we wrote letters to Santa. We made sure to tell him how we have been good this year and we also asked him very important questions like: Do you go on vacation? Do you celebrate Christmas? Does Rudolph really have a red nose? Then we asked very politely for a few things for Christmas.

AC is working very hard to make sure all his words are spelled correctly:

Some more serious writers:

When we were done writing we also colored a picture to go with it:

I will be taking these letters to the East Oregonian and submitting them for their special Christmas Newsletter that comes in the December 24th edition of the paper. Be watching to see if your student's letter is included!


We also squeezed in some time for a few math games: This one is an adding game called Flip It.

This is a fraction bingo game:

We practiced our spelling words a little bit on spelling city:

But the most fun part of our day was when it was time for Science! We have a guest teacher at our school who is in the graduate program at the University of Oregon. He is a scientist and he is showing us how to be like him. How to think like a scientist, observe like a scientist and question like a scientist.

We got to do an investigation today to begin our unit on solids and liquids. We were given some materials and allowed to explore them. Our directions were to feel them, touch them, have them interact together and then see what happened. We also had to think of how to describe them.

We took a break and wrote some words down on our word bank that described our materials. We made a list of some of their properties.

Then we were given a few more things to work with.

We will be doing more experiments and science investigations for the next two weeks. Be warned! Your children might start doing some experiments at home too!

Glitter and Glue

On the Friday before our week off we did a couple of fun things. Two reading groups had just finished a unit test and so they were able to choose a Reader's Theatre story that they would perform for the class. The Green group chose the story of How Bear Lost His Tail.

They each had a part in the story and they worked really hard on reading with expression and fluency so that their audience would be able to listen and follow along easily.

The Red Group chose the story of The Lion and The Hare.

Their reading sounded so good! They had been practicing and practicing their parts and I loved hearing the difference from the first time they read their parts to when they read to the class.

In the afternoon we did an art project and since it will be Christmas before I know it, we went ahead and decorated some ornaments. I got out the glitter and glue and the students cheered as though I was Santa himself. First they carefully colored their ornaments and then they would glue and glitter and then glue and glitter and then glue and glitter some more.

They turned out beautiful and we will hang them in our hallway for a couple of weeks and then send them home for you to enjoy!