Friday, I'm in Love

This was another great week in Mod 10. We ended it with an author visit and our first birthday celebration. I'm glad we survived the sugar this afternoon. The kids enjoyed the cupcakes and so did I! Thank you August birthday families for the sweet treats.

I hope all of you have a great long weekend. I'm heading to the beach for some much-needed rest, sand, and sun.

I will be out of the classroom on Tuesday for UOI planning. The students will continue to work on their inquiries and I will be working to ensure that term 2 is as inspiring as term 1. Please remind your kiddos that the Classroom Agreements still apply regardless of who is teaching in the classroom.

Have a wonderful long weekend! Enjoy football, the Decatur Book Festival, DragonCon, or maybe all three. I love your kiddos and I hope that you can make some great memories this weekend. If you happen to go see Jason Reynolds and want to get something signed for me, I would love you forever :)

Friday Finale

what a great week! We finally finished MAP testing and all the kids breathed a sigh of relief! Next week we will be back to our regular schedule for the most part 😁.  I will post in more detail about our Morning Merting today, but your kids are awesome and have a lot of opinions about really important things! Please listen to what they have to say and know that they are truly impacted by things that happen in our world more than we all realize.

I also wanted to remind you that I often add new items to my Amazon wishlist. Be sure to check it out: https://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/4S390URD0YIR

Blue Monday

So everyone seemed to be a little bit off today. Lots of students were tired and not feeling their best, but we pushed through. We were also very chatty today and that made for a CRAZY teacher! :) This gave us a great opportunity to go back to our classroom agreements and redefine what each one means. It's always nice to be able to review our agreements and make sure that we know what they mean.

We began working on the Amendment Process, the writing process, and grammar mentor sentences. Here are some pictures of the charts we created today.

What's in Your Warrant?

Great lessons today on due process and powers of 10. Students were asked to draw images that represented the due process protections in the Constitution. We also introduced the flexible seating. Here are some pictures.

Seashell and Stone

We inquired into methods scientists use to classify living things today. Students worked together to develop a model that could effectively be used to sort shells by their physical characteristics. They learned a lot about classifying. Some students were frustrated that they couldn't agree as a group how to sort the shells. This was a great lesson for our scientists to learn. Here are some pictures.

Good Friday!

We had quite a busy Friday today! We continued to work to develop our procedures for math workshop and we had our First Friday celebration where students had to work as a team to complete a variety of activities. Check out the pictures below.

The Operation

Today students were introduced to our workshop structure for math. We talked about the expectations for the whole time and we are ready to start our workshop on Monday! I was also super excited about the students that are using their understanding of organizing groups to create a book club and a classroom newpaper!

Every Day I Write the Book

Students were introduced today to the first element of Writer's Workshop - Free Writing. For many students, this is the first time that they were allowed to write anything they like, including comic books! They were so excited and it was great to see some students that have in the past not liked writing become successful writers during this time. Here are some pictures!

Brain Stew

What a great day! We began to work on our understanding of number systems in math. We also continued to work on developing our understanding of inquiry and the processes and procedures used by scientists to perform and record information during experimentation.

Here are some great pictures from our work today!

Monday, Monday

It's hard to believe that we started week 2 today! Students have been working hard to establish our classroom agreements. We have settled upon the agreements listed below. We also discussed logical consequences and the goal of any consequence being that students need to get back to work.

Here Comes the Sun!

Wow! One week down. It's hard to believe that we are finished with the first week of 5th grade! Today we worked on small group agreements, math problem solving, and we finally got an outside recess! Students also got to give me some advice about what they would like to do next week, and they did such a good job that we will be able to do a lot of the things they asked to do!

 Check out these pictures!

Parents - DON'T FORGET YOUR HOMEWORK! 

Rock the Boat

One of my favorite activities of the year is creating foil boats to hold penny passengers! Students work together to build boats out of foil and we test each boat to see which one can hold the most pennies without sinking. Here are some pictures.