Week 30 in Review

Greetings from Room 119!  We had a great week!  This week's Thoughtful Thursday Project went out to Mrs. Bandy's nephew, T.J.  To see our project, you can click HERE. We continue to touch many lives with this project.  We have gotten many letters, emails and facebook messages thanking us for the good we are doing!  We love spreading kindness!

This week we celebrated Earth Day!  We've done a lot with Earth Day this month including fun things with buddies, reading earth-related type books and turning off lights when we are able.

 You probably heard by now that Mrs. Doran read us a book called, "Not a Box" and then showed us THIS video about a little boy who made an entire arcade out of boxes and imagination.  We were so excited after seeing the video that some of us went home and made our own creations (and Mrs. D. LOVED that our parents sent her pictures of our creations!

 There is so much value in experimenting and creating using our imagination.  Don't forget to save your recycled materials and unwanted things for Room 119.  We'll be joining our 5th grade buddies to create things in school on Wednesday. If you have packaging tape you can donate, that would be great too.  You can send in things any day up through Wednesday.

In math this week we loved working with Symmetry!  This was a lot of fun for us and while our eyes are still developing, many of us did really well with this activity!

 We've also been exploring the Hundred's Chart and how numbers work together.  We've been doing number models where Mrs. D. lifted a group of numbers from the chart and we had to complete them.

Right now we are using a filled in number grid to help us complete these problems which is good!  Tools are meant to be used.  As we grow, we will rely less on those tools.

Our reading has really taken off and we are reading more and more.  We enjoyed visiting the book fair to buy books for our homes too.  Remember, if at any time you'd like to order a certain book you can use the Scholastic book link on the blog!

We had an author come and visit us on Friday and share her book, "Diary of a Real Bully."  Melody Arabo was a teacher at Keith Elementary in our district and was also Michigan's Teacher of the Year.  She wrote a great book and we loved listening to her read and talk about it.

We have begun science!  Ask us what matter is (anything that takes up space), how many forms of matter there are (3) and what those forms are (solid, liquid and gas).  We also did a great job describing properties of matter.  This week we specifically looked at solids and their properties.  We explored different solids and enjoyed building with them.  We worked by ourselves and in table groups and of course asked Mrs. D. to take pictures of us!

Our regularly scheduled Mystery Reader was unable to make it so we had a different Mystery Reader... Miss Doran!  That's right, Mrs. Doran's daughter came and read to us and she arrived a little late so read an unplanned book but did great just the same!  I think we've never been so quiet for a Mystery Reader (perhaps because we were just staring at her~ we hadn't really seen Mrs. D's biological kids in the flesh before).

As always, this is just a snap shot of our week.  Mrs. D. took a lot more pictures (especially of science).  She also got to see three of us when we were playing one of her sons on the soccer field.  What fun~ those pictures are including in the extra pictures video too.  You can click HERE to see it.

Have a wonderful week!

Week 29 in Review

Greetings from Room 119!  We are now in our FINAL marking period of the year which is amazing!  We are working hard to get ready for second grade.  The beginning of the week was great but we got a bit louder as the week went on and the warm weather set in.  This week's Thoughtful Thursday Project went out to Karrie.  To see her story and see what we sent her, click HERE.  We've already gotten many thank you messages from her and those who love her.  Room 119 continues to do wonderful work in this world and it tied into our attitude target (and classroom meeting topic) this week to be an encourager!

 Of course our first day back we wanted to talk all about our vacations (or stay-cations) so instead of talking we wrote about our adventures.  Mrs. D. told us when we shared we could ONLY share what we wrote which had us writing a lot of detail.  We did a great job!

You may have heard of our current writing project which is to write our own version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears (with some twists).  We've shared and questioned with friends to help develop our writing.  Ask us what we're writing about.  We hope to have our books done next week.

Have we told you about our Go Noodle brain breaks?  We love them and were so excited about the new Pop-see-ko 2.0!  You'll have to ask us to sing it for your if we haven't already.

 This week we celebrated our friend, Emiliano's 7th birthday!  He brought in small gifts for us and we were all very well-mannered thanking Emiliano for this thoughtfulness.

In math we continued to work on fractions and also started working on symmetry.  We also took a math assessment on Thursday and did very well.  You will see those scores coming home next week.

As you know, Mrs. D. emailed out a survey on homework.  She's still waiting for more responses and they have been all over the board.  As of now, we will still have homework as usual next week.  Regardless of what happens with the surveys, paper books will keep coming home.  We continue to improve our fluency and some of us are working at responding to text in writing which is a new skill for us.

Our Mystery Reader this week was Nolan's mom!  She did a great job reading and we enjoyed the book.  Nolan's mom is also one of our "Motor Moms."  Have you heard of Motor Moms?  If not, ask us about it!

Mrs. D. was at a Social Justice meeting on Friday so Ms. Carter (Mrs. Doran's former first grade student-gulp) taught us.  Of course this post is just a snapshot of what we did this week.  Mrs. D's goal is to give more updates throughout the week on Twitter and the class FB page.  Thank you for checking out what we do during the week.  If you would like to see additional pictures from the week, you can click HERE.

Week 28 in Review

Greetings from Room 119 (or wherever you are spending this week off)!  We had a wonderful (but short) week.  Mrs. Doran was out on Monday because she is on a Social Justice Committee for the district.  Overall we were great for the sub. We also did another wonderful job on our Thoughtful Thursday project.  This week's project went to Mrs. Doran's Uncle Zig and she already heard back from many (tearful) family members telling her to thank us for our awesome job. To see the project, you can click HERE.

 We had a great time celebrating Landon's 7th Birthday!  He also opened a birthday "Fly Guy" book from his family.  Fly Guy books are great!  Check them out at the library or visit the Scholastic Website via our class blog!

Mrs. D. was able to read with many of us and was pleased with how we are growing as readers!  Some of us have mentioned that we have a hard time fitting in reading at home so Mrs. D. is going to try to get some fifth grade friends to visit us for about 5 minutes so we can read to them.

We are spending a bit of time on handwriting each day and our classroom work is becoming much neater.  We continue to work on our individual targets and are growing as learners.  We began planning for writing our own versions of "Goldilocks & the Three Bears."  Ask us our ideas.  We'll work more on the 'recipe' for this story after break.

We learned about fractions and did a great job.  We should be able to tell you that a fraction simply means "part" of something or part of a whole something.  We also worked identifying when a shape was divided equally.  Some shapes were harder than others and we did a great job defending our thinking and answers.

Did you know we've been learning all about the Statue of Liberty.  Ask us what a symbol is (something that represents something else), what National Symbols we learned about and what we recall about the Statue of Liberty- we had a lot of questions about the Statue of Liberty so Mrs. D. did more research with us to help get answers to our questions.

With the short week, we did not have a Mystery Reader but had fun on Thursday for our Pajama Read-In with our 5th Grade Buddies.  There are more pictures from the week that you can see by clicking HERE.  Have a wonderful and restful week!