Subtraction Poem!

To coincide with the beginning of our subtraction unit, we wrote down a cute subtraction poem today that will hang in our class.  The kids had a blast rhyming to it all afternoon :)

"Travel" Partners

We began Reading Workshop this week with an analogy about how reading is like traveling- and like traveling, reading is better when you're not alone!  This past summer I traveled with my best friend Erika to Europe and am using some experiences I had to aid in teaching Reading Workshop :)

I'm finding there are so many connections, it makes workshop very fun!  For instance, it took Erika and I weeks to plan our trip because we needed to figure out what we each liked and therefore where we wanted to visit.  Similarly in Reading Workshop, students will work within their reading "families" that we started yesterday to get to know a partner of their choosing and what they each like so that they can pick books to read together.

Of course, Erika and I didn't agree 100% of the time on things we wanted to see.  I didn't share the same interest in the Tower of Pisa as she did, and she was not as enthusiastic about the hike I wanted to do in the Cinque Terre.  Although we briefly went our separate ways, at the end of those days we were each SO excited about what we'd experienced that we highly recommended our activity to each other and convinced one another to someday take part in what we'd missed :) 

Reader's do the same thing!  They make recommendations and help one another experience things they may not have otherwise experienced.

As the boys and girls get more involved with workshop, we will fill out the rest of the connections in our chart :)

** Marshmallow Mug **

Since we recently won our Marble Party by getting 100 marbles in the jar, we have officially started the process over!  The only difference this time is instead of a jar that the students are trying to fill with marbles, they have a mug that they're trying to fill with marshmallows :)  Once the mug is full, we will earn a winter party!  Class and table points are big motivators for doing our best- the kids really love their mug!

Gumby Sentences

The boys and girls have been practicing the Writing Process by prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing their work.  We are solid in our knowledge of how to create a topic sentence, come up with key ideas, and generate details. We are also good at filling out a brief outline as a part of our prewriting :) 

Transitioning from outlines to drafts is challenging because formulating full sentences from brief ones is a larger process.  To aid in this process we talked about stretching sentences- or making a "Gumby" sentence! 

We read a wonderful story called "That Rabbit Belongs To Emily Brown" about a girl with a stuffed animal rabbit named Stanley, and a vivid imagination!  In the story, the Royal Queen will do anything to get Stanley away from Emily Brown.   After we read the story we talked about some key details.  One key detail that continued to pop up was "there was a rabbit". 

You can see in the poster that we wrote this idea down.  Little by little we began to stretch the sentence by thinking more about it, and then adding more about what we knew.  We WROTE what we THOUGHT. 

The kids overwhelmingly agreed that the last sentence we formulated was the best because it was the most interesting.  As writers, we want our readers to be interested so the goal from this point forward will be to "gumby" sentences in our writing :)

Reading Workshop Launch!

We launched our Reading Workshop with a lesson on ownership!  Being responsible for your own reading life is a powerful message and one I want to send right away. Children need a clear vision of what powerful readers look like so we will build upon this image as we move through the year.

We started today by discussing what readers who are in Reading Workshop do.  Please see the above list :)  After talking about how we are in control of our own reading including what we like to read, where we read, and when we read, the students wrote on their whiteboards a favorite book they have and where they were when they read it.  Next we made a class list of all of the places we like to read, and lastly we talked about why we liked those places so much.  The idea was for the students to begin to recognize that reading is not just something we do, it's something we feel :)

We wrapped up by thinking about whether or not we could recreate some of our "favorite reading spots" in the classroom... and many spots can be closely replicated!
Today we talked about traveling shoes and how what kind of shoe you wear depends on where you're going, how far the walk is, and how big your feet are!  The take-away point for today was that THE SHOE DOESN'T ALWAYS FIT!  Similarities in our "shoes" will determine which traveling group the kids are a part of.  These will change as our feet grow, but what will never change is that travelers never travel alone. Tomorrow we will talk more about "never traveling alone" as readers.

We will work to establish reading partnerships which will foster reading histories, reading interests, and reading hopes.  I am so excited that this journey has begun :)

Math Bowling!

Today I taught the kids a new game called "Math Bowling".  Each student had a whiteboard and pen and drew 10 pins, followed by the numbers 1-10 as shown above.  I then rolled the two giant dice and using whatever 2 numbers I rolled students used addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division to cross off or "knock down" each pin. I kept track of what pairs of numbers had been rolled on the board, and students had to show how they knocked down each pin!  For example if I rolled a 3 and 2, students could knock down the 6 because 3x2=6. 

The boys and girls had so much fun with this, I think I will continue to use it as a math warm up :)

IT's ArT TiME!

We had such a great time today with Mrs. O learning all about how artists use lines in art! We talked about organic lines in nature, dotted lines, circular lines, zigzag lines and much more! We practiced making these lines on a piece of paper as you can see in the above pictures. After practicing lines we discussed shades and how to press firmly or lightly depending on what type of line you want- fair or bold. Then we added this shading to our lines practice.

Next we looked at pictures of animals and observed all the different kinds of lines on them! From there we practiced drawing the animals and then traced them in ink. The last step was to color in the picture with pastels. These turned out SO well! They will stay in our classroom for a bit before being sent hom :) Thank you Mrs. O!