A Short Week!

Wow, last week was very short with President's Day on Monday, early dismissal on Thursday, and a snow day on Friday!  Needless to say, much of my lesson plans were moved to this week.  I must say that my kiddos were hard workers though and we did accomplish quite a bit in such a short amount of time.

We read several biographies about George Washington learning many facts along the way.
  
Students recorded those facts on a graphic organizer, and then incorporated them into their own complete sentences.  Of course, we also squeezed in a cute craftivity to hold our writing.

For one of our spelling practice sessions, students sat back-to-back and played a guessing game.  One student would choose a spelling word, write it on his/her dry erase board, and then proceed to give clues to their "back" partner.  The student guessing listened for clues about the word and wrote down such things as: number of letter spaces, letter box size (tall letters, short letters, letters with tails in the basement), and specific letters, as they tried to guess the word.  Everyone enjoyed this lively, interactive game.

The weather service has issued another "winter weather warning" for this week, so stay tuned to see what happens!

                                                                                                                                                                 

February Update

Hi!  This is part two of our blog update.  We began the month learning all about groundhogs of course in honor of Groundhog's Day.  We made some cute groundhogs and wrote facts that we learned along the way.  Unfortunately, I didn't get any photos of these.

We had fun learning about President Lincoln this month.  As we learned new information, students completed pages in a booklet.  On one of the pages students traced Lincoln's movement from state to state during his life.  We also examined the penny and made rubbings.

We read the book "Mr. Lincoln's Hat" by Martha Brenner and the boys and girls drew pictures of what they'd carry in their hat.

We also read many books about this fascinating president and then used a graphic organizer to list facts we learned.  The students then wrote a paragraph containing facts and created their own "President Lincoln" to display along with their writing.

Valentine's Day was filled with activities.  Here is a Smilebox for you to enjoy:

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January Update

The month of January has come and gone, but our class was busy with many fun learning activities.  With snow days (cold days) and my home computer not working for awhile,  I am late getting this posted; however, we thought you would like to see some of our work.

I brought in some of my snow globe collection to show the students.  Then, we read the book, "Snow Globe Family" by Jane O'Conner.  The students enjoyed imagining what it would be like to live in a snow globe and spent time sharing ideas.  After choosing an idea, they completed a graphic organizer and then wrote their story.  Finally, everyone created a snow globe to illustrate their story.

     

Our biggest writing project of the month involved researching facts about arctic animals.  The boys and girls worked with a partner to read through books and then write facts on sticky notes.  These notes were later placed on corresponding pages in their report booklets to aid students in their writing.

And finally, after being postponed because of "snow days" and "too-cold days" we celebrated the one hundredth day of school.  A yummy "Hundredth Day" snack awaited students on their desks upon arriving at school.  We also completed pages in a booklet with such items as our favorite 100 things to eat, what we'd buy with $100.00, what we'd look like when we are 100, what we'd want 100 of, etc.

Students made crowns that contained 100 fingerprint dots!

Students displayed their collections of 100 items and everyone enjoyed touring the displays.

It was a fun ending to the month of January!