Sticky Like Glue

Welcome back to Mod. 10! We had a great Monday today. Students kicked off our new UOI - How the World Works. We also wrote another narrative today. Students were given glue to put on their hands and wrote about their experience. We will compare and contrast those narratives with informational pieces regarding the same activity on Wednesday. We also started working on identifying and analyzing informational text structures in reading.

It is also Banned Books Week. If you want to read some great books with your children some of these are great for this week. Frequently Challenged Books

We also talked today about how important it is for students to read all the time. We are working to understanding the connections between reading and success. Here are the charts I shared with the kids about how reading impacts their achievement on tests.

Check out some pictures of what we did today. Hope everyone had a great MONDAY!

(Pop) Rock Candy

Today was a fun day! I love it when we get to break the rules in order to create experiences for our narrative writing. The rule we broke today was eating candy for breakfast! The kids had a great time and produced some great writing pieces. We still have some work to do with our writing conventions, but we have already come a long way with our ability to tell a story!

Here are a few samples:

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.