Oh Rainbow Fair Oh Rainbow Fair

Poem of the week!

Weather Pictures

At the end of our week learning all about weather, we created a picture collage of the four main types of weather....sunny, cloudy, rainy and snowy. After we made the pictures, we gathered in a circle and shared what our favorite type of weather is and why. We had several sunny's, a few snowy's, one or two rainy's and one cloudy! All of which had very good reasons why it was their favorite!

Read with Pacing, Word by Word Matching & Read with Expression

Today we practiced three strategies when reading our weekly poem during our third mini-lesson as a class. A few students took a turn to show off how they have been practicing these strategies every night when they read the poem with their family. These kids are becoming such good readers! I'm so proud!

New to Work on Writing!

Throughout the school year we have had a couple of different choices to our Work on Writing choice during Daily 5. With the 90 minute reading block our writing portion has to be a response to a story type of writing. Today I introduced two new options to respond to a story during this choice. The first option is a "Character Profile" page. The student chooses a book from his/her book box and completes the chart using one or more of the characters from the book. The second choice the student is to pick a scene from the book and illustrate "All About the Setting". I modeled these two options using one of the weather books we read this week called Learn About Weather RAIN.

Science with Mr. Moffatt!

Jenah's dad came in this week for her Surfer of the Week and showed us a few science experiments that have to do with static electricity. He is an electrician and first talked to us about different types of electricity and how it works. The class was VERY excited to learn all about this and thought he was a magician afterward with all of his tricks with static electricity. Thank you Mr. Moffatt for coming in and teaching us about your job!

Narrative Writing

We moved on from practicing opinion piece writings and now have moved to narrative writing. When we first practiced narratives, we created a chart together as to what items needed to be in a narrative. Once we came up with the list, we then orally told stories that could easily be written down as a narrative, but instead we just practiced including all of the pieces when speaking, as well as keeping the stories to 3-4 sentences.


Once we practiced and modeled several narratives, we then  moved on to writing a class narrative about a field trip we took to McCutcheon High School for their Ag Day. I emphasized four important words in order to keep our writing to the point and flowing in the correct order without getting off track. The words we used were "First, Next, Then and Finally". We wrote the piece together recalling our field trip.


After we wrote our piece together, we practiced illustrating each portion of our writing next to each of those four important words. When the students begin doing these steps independently, we will flip flop the way we did this and I will have them first illustrate a story by using the page below and drawing what happened first, next, then and last. We will then write the narrative using their illustrations to help recall the story in order and including the other important pieces of a narrative!

New Behavior Chart!

 

I realized I haven't posted about our new behavior chart. I used to have a system where the students all started out swimming in the ocean as fish and then if they made a poor choice they would move their fish to the 5, 10, 15 and Sea Snake (aka the office and phone call home). This really worked great for a few years until I realized all I was doing was punishing students for not making good choices, but what about all of those students who were making the RIGHT choices? Sooooo, in comes the new behavior chart. The chart starts off with every students clip in the middle green "Ready to Learn at the Beach" choice. Moving down the chart the parts are yellow-"Sink or Swim", orange-"Wipe Out" and red-"Shark Tank". Going up the chart they are purple-"Surf's Up", pink-"Riding the Wave" and the highest one is blue-"Top Surfer". Throughout the day students have the opportunity to get "caught" making good choices for themselves or even helping out others and can move their clip up. On the flip side, if they are not making the best choices the clip can be moved down. Moving the clip down results in 5 minutes, 10 minutes and 15 minutes from recess. If a student ends on the red/Shark Tank, he/she has a red note to take home that explains what choices were made and needs to be signed and returned the following day. Moving up the chart is the BEST! If at the end of the day the student ends up on purple they earn a Brownie Buck (mini-economy system), pink a Brownie Buck and a skittle/M&M (whatever is in the jar on my desk) and if they end up as the Top Surfer on blue they earn a Brownie Buck and a automatic trip to the class treasure box! I just LOVE to see the kids working so very hard to earn their way back up the chart, even if they make a poor choice at some point in the day they can earn their way back up!

Weather Kids

Starting off our weather unit this week, we split up into four groups (we have 4 windows in our classroom) and became weather kids for our classroom! Everyday for the next two weeks before spring break we are filling out a weather graph...sunny, rainy, windy, foggy, overcast/cloudy and snowy.....we will see which type of weather we had the most and least of in those two weeks!

We have new table names to go along with our weather unit! We have the sunny table, cloudy table, snowy table, stormy table, raindrop table and the partly cloudy/partly sunny table (depending on which side you are on).