Days With Mrs. Doran: Week 9 in Review

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Week 9 in Review

Greetings from room 119! It is hard to believe that Halloween is over and we are now into November. On Halloween, Mrs. D. told us she bought us skittles and had a fun activity planned, but because (after numerous reminders) we continued to need reminders as a class to control our volume, we didn't do the activity. So she put the skittles in the prize bucket, and gave us the option of doing the math activity at home with any skittles we might get on Halloween. Hopefully we learned a valuable lesson - that when Mrs. D. says something, she follows through.

Despite missing out on the Halloween activity, we did have a lot of fun this week. One of the highlights was practicing our handwriting with shaving cream. We practiced the letters we wrote last week over and over and Mrs. D. was able to check us all to make sure we were forming our letters the correct way. This is a fun activity you can do at home as well. Mrs. D. has done it with her own children but recommends putting shaving cream on a cookie sheet to make less mess. We look forward to being able to do this again. Thank you to those of you who donated shaving cream at the beginning of the year!

With November here, so comes testing... We took our first Benchmark Assessment (BA) in math this week. We all worked at our own pace. Some of us finished it in 20 minutes and others took multiple days (Mrs. D. didn't let us work more than 20 minutes at a time). She read the questions to us and helped us understand the question, though she could not help us find the answer. In math we worked more with frames and arrows and worked at different levels in workshop. Mrs. D. taught those who were ready how to do frames and arrows with two rules. We had fun and felt these problems were like puzzles.

We had some nice weather this week so Mrs. D. took advantage of that weather and got us outside. One of the assessments she needed to do with us was writing "known words". We had to be away from any print material in order to do this assessment so we all went outside with a paper, white board (to write on) and a pencil and wrote all the words we could. Mrs. D. did prompt us after a while reminding us to write any color words we knew as well as word families that we've worked on this year.

In Reader's Workshop this week (and word study), we shifted and focused on accuracy. We did word hunts for long and short vowels and also learned about digraphs (which are two letters that make one totally new sound like in "sh", "ch" or "th"...). Mrs. D. hadn't planned on focusing on digraphs this week, but since some of us had questions about them, she changed her plans. We will learn about more digraphs in word study next week. In writing, Mrs. D. added our recent portfolio pieces to our writing blog. You can check out our writing by clicking HERE.

Our fifth grade friends were off to camp this week, but we were glad that they were back in school on Friday. There is some exciting news at Loon Lake. Our PE teacher, Mr. Olack, is getting married on Sunday and so we worked hard on some banners that we will hang in the gym for when he comes back to school. We also included well wishes for him and his wife.

Finally we had a Fun Friday activity which included making some turkeys and writing something that we are thankful for. For these activities, Mrs. D. tells us what to do and then we go back and write step by step directions. This is great practice in writing "How to's", retelling, and is also a great reference to look at when we are completing the task. The turkeys' feathers were made by tracing our hands, their bodies were were made by tracing our shoe and Mrs. D. took a picture of each us so we could use our picture as the turkey face.

Finally we ended Friday with our Mystery Reader. Elizabeth's mom (who was one of our math volunteers earlier in the day), came back to surprise us and be our Mystery Reader. She read a great book with a wonderful message. We were an AMAZING audience (much better than our behavior on Monday), and ended the day cleaning up and dancing to one of our favorite songs... (stay tuned- more on that next week!)