One More Week!

We have one more week of winter break! I hope you are all enjoying the snow and time with your family and friends. I thought some of you might be wondering about your reading folders and Chapter Books since I am sure most of you don't have them with you. Who knew we would miss those last two days of school? Not to worry! We will continue working on your Chapter Books and will probably start on a new theme for reading groups. Don't worry about your unfinished work in your reading folders.

Merry Christmas! :)
Please make sure you bring your snow gear to school. I want everyone to stay nice and toasty at recess. I am sure we will go outside if it isn't too cold!

I miss you all and can't wait to see you next Monday!

Some Fun!

I have added a couple of new polls on the sidebar. Take a look and try to answer the questions. I will post the answers when the poll closes. Have fun!

Let It Snow Let It Snow Let It Snow.....

I can't believe how much snow we have in the last 24 hours!
I thought you might be looking for something to do so here are some ideas:

• Read and journal or draw a picture about what you have read


• Journal about what you have been doing today


• Draw a picture or pictures of what it looks like outside your house


• Put together a puzzle. How long did it take you?


• Practice your math facts


• Measure how deep the snow is in different parts of your yard (with parent permission) and make a bar graph


• Make a "Times Table" (How many of your multiplication facts do you know?)


• Ask someone to list a set of 7 or 8 numbers and try to figure out the median, mode and range. Is there an outlier in that set?


• Write a story about the Medical Lake Snow Day(Be sure to design a cover for your story)


• Make a list of as many "snow" or "winter" words as you can and then alphabetize them.


• Now can you write them in cursive? How many can you use in a sentence?


• How many different words can you find in the phrase "Medical Lake's Winter Wonderland"? What's the biggest word you can make using these letters?

On the First Day of Christmas, My True Love....

We all know the song "The 12 Days of Christmas". When you think about it, whoever is singing the song's true love, ended up giving a lot of gifts! A Partridge in a Pear Tree every day for 12 days? That's 12 partridges! Two Turtle Doves every day for eleven days? That's 22 doves! So, we took some time today to see exactly how many gifts were given and how much all those gifts cost (we had a price list). After working for a while, Shay thought he had the right answer. The problem was that his answer didn't match my answer sheet. He was determined to solve it and tried a couple more times. Same answer! So, I sat down with Shay, Garet and Joseph and after four tries, guess what. They were right! The answer key was wrong. The total was $11,985.80! After we figured that out, we had to decide how many hundred dollar bills, twenties, tens, fives, ones and coins we needed to make $11,985.80. It was a lot of thinking and a lot of fun....we worked with partners and used calculators. The kids were great problem solvers. They were all very persistent!

Success!!

Alex and her mom are taking our bean plants home to put in their green house. When her mom came to get the plants today, Mrs. Overman was helping and she discovered that our plants had produced a couple of beans! I was so excited. We started these plants from seeds and grew them in a hydroponic system. We had noticed the flowers a couple of weeks ago but I had no idea we actually had beans!! Great job kids!

Reading Groups....

Four days a week, we "open the wall" and work with our neighbor class and their teacher, Mrs. Overman. We have 5 reading groups and rotate through different stations. We usually go to two stations a day. Our stations are called Leveled Readers, Independent Practice, Chapter Books and Meet with Teacher (we work on stories in our reading book here). We also have a reading helper, Mrs. Washburn, who comes in and works with a group of readers. Mrs. Overman and I love Reading Groups. We get to hear everyone read several times a week! The students like being able to do different activities. Here are a few of our friends working during "Independent Practice" and in a "Meet With Teacher" group.

Writing, Writing, Writing

Today was a busy day. Miss Landeene, our student teacher from EWU, has been working really hard with us to help us become better writers. She gave us a story starter a few weeks ago....If you could do anything for a day, what would you do? She has taken us through the entire writing process and today we worked on our final drafts. She put together some really cool books so we can "publish" our final copies. They are turning out really cool! Thanks for all your help, Miss Landeene!

Something New!

I found some fun "gadgets" and added them to the web page. If you look on the right side, you will see a "Word of the Day" link. It gives you a definition and if you click on the "more" button, you can learn more about the word and hear how it is pronounced. I think it would be a lot of fun if you wanted to send a comment and see if you can use the word in a sentence! Only one rule, you can't use the example sentence that is given!

I also added a "friendship quote" of the day. Take a look and let me know what you think!

And The Winner Is....

We finally have a name for our newspaper. We had many great suggestions! These reporters are very creative! After an exciting voting process, we chose "Kids Monthly News"....now I hope we can put one together every month. :)

Calling All Mathematicians!

I was searching for some fun "place value" activites and stumbled across this website. I tried a couple of the activities and thought they were fun and very helpful. One thing I like about this site is that you can choose different levels of activities by using the arrows at the top of the page to change the grade level. If you have some time, get your "math brains out" and give it a try.... let me know what you think!

http://www.internet4classrooms.com/skills_4th_original.htm

And A Newspaper Was Born!

Robert has been talking about writing a newspaper. He has been very excited about it and had even asked some friends in the class to help him create it. As I was listening to these "future reporters" start talking about the paper, I thought this sounded like something the whole class would love to do. So, I asked Robert if he would mind if the whole class created the paper. He said, "I would love the help!" It only took seconds before the class was buzzing with ideas. We brainstormed some topics for the paper and then partnered up to begin writing the articles. Of course I had to turn it into writing lesson, so I did a quick lesson on "Who, What, Where, When, Why and How" and then passed out some Time For Kids magazines so the kids could do a little research on what a news article looks like.

The conversations were great! Since this was not part of my official lesson plans, I'm not quite sure where this will lead but I am very excited to find out. I love these "teachable moments" and it was so much fun to see their excitement! Being the teacher that I am, there had to be a homework assignment tied to all of this fun.....come up with a name for our paper. We will vote on the suggestions tomorrow. I can hardly wait to see the winning name!

We Are Scientists!

The most exciting thing happening in our room has to be science! We are loving our "Structures of Life" science kits. We started by observing seeds. We compared several different kinds of seeds and then started the sprouting process using our mini-sprouters. We observed and recorded our observations for about a week.....paying close attention to changes. We even started developing a word bank. After the seeds were sprouted, we transferred some to the hydroponics tubs. We are now measuring them once a week. We are hoping we can grow a bean!!

Next came the Land Snails! Who would have thought we could have fun learning with Land Snails? We have learned what snails need to have in their habitats to live and stay healthy. We have also made some interesting discoveries about their "scat"....you will have to ask one of our scientists about this! Did you know that Land Snails can pull many times their own mass? One of our snails weighed about 6 grams and it pulled 156 grams across the desk. How do they do it?

Just when we thought school couldn't get any more exciting, the crayfish arrived! It was very eventful when we took them out of their containers to observe their interesting bodies. After observing, the students labeled crayfish diagrams and described what a crayfish needs to survive in their science notebooks. The best part of this science lesson was watching the scientists courageously pick the crayfish up. They were very brave!

It's A New Blog!

Well, I have found a new way to communicate with you. Actually, Mrs. Gleason has had a really cute blog for quite some time. I always have a lot of fun looking at hers. Over this long weekend, I finally put one together about my life at home. It was really fun and easy once I got the hang of things (and some advice from Mrs. Gleason). I like this one a lot better than the one attached to my school website. So, just like Mrs. Gleason, I have created this one for school. I am hoping some of my students will want to start a blog of their own (with parent permission, of course!) so we can follow each other's blogs. Even if you don't set one up of your own, I hope you take time to stop by and look at this class blog. I will try to keep everyone up to date on what is happening in class. I will also include some pictures of students that I have permission to use their pictures. Feel free to leave a comment, too!