Happy Holidays! I hope you enjoy a safe, fun, relaxing time with friends and family during this holiday break.
This week we finished our time in 2011 with another action packed week.Check out our all the great pieces students wrote, published and shared at our Author's Chair!
Below, please enjoy the pictures our class selected and captions that students wrote today during our writing time--they're now all accomplished Bloggers!
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| We celebrate our second Author's Chair by doing a toast and raising our cups of apple juice in the air. |
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| Death. A dead fish lies on the ground, unconscious, with an upside down snail accompanying him. We're watching the decomposition process in one of our ecocolumns. |
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| Author's Chair. This author presents his dramatic story while the class listens quietly. |
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| Pushing buttons. Last Friday evening we had a special visitor after hours. William came to check out the classroom and our technology. |
Math
- Reviewed and finished Unit 5, took the final test and an open response
- We'll start Unit 6 when we resume school in January
- Read a Time for Kids edition about the coolest inventions of 2011. Students wrote opinion journal entries about which invention was most important/why
- Learned about thinkmarks (like a bookmark, but tracks your thinking). Students practiced writing their thinking on sticky notes and placing those in the book. This will lead us to some deeper thinking/written reflection in the near future.
- Met with our 2nd grade reading buddies in Miss Evanger's class
- Finished our STC Ecosystems unit (the one with ecocolumns). Students analyzed/discussed the findings of their pollution experiments and extrapolated to what the effects might be on columns that actually contained animals
- Watched/discussed a short film and a written piece about Chesapeake Bay--a real ecosystem with pollution problems
- Took some end of unit ecosystems and engineering assessments
- Published personal narrative pieces from our second unit of writing in a picture book format (Read them all here)
- We held an author's chair and students shared their work with the class
