This week a few of our students worked on creating a line graph to compare the high temperatures of Olmsted Falls,Ohio, Aurora, New Zealand, Hudsonville,Michigan, and Apache Junction, Arizona, for the week. It was so neat to see how the lines intersected and even how our temperatures and those in Arizona kind of paralleled each other! Tomorrow the students will finish the graph and we will publish an updated picture.
Here are the photos of our rainbow linking words and our pots of good! The leprechauns would be proud! I love how every pot is a little different! They really brighten up our room!
If you are one of our Quadblogging buddies, please write in the comments below your high temperature for Monday and today. Some of our students are going to create a comparative line graph to show all of our Quadblogging buddies together ! This should be very interesting because although we are starting to warm up around here, it still feels cool for March!
Have a great night!
Hello Friends!
This week we have a series of different activities we’d like to share with you!
Linking Words
Last week, we started learning about linking words that we can use in our persuasive writing. Linking words are words or phrases that we use to connect our big ideas . We ALWAYS use a comma after a linking word or phrase and they always come at the beginning of a sentence. For a fun craft today, we brainstormed some of the more challenging linking words like “Furthermore”, “In addition”, and “For example”. I wonder if some of our students or some of our Quadblogging buddies can think of other linking words or phrases? List them below in the comments!
So we brainstormed a collection of linking words and wrote each one separately on to different colored strips of paper. We made a black pot and lots of gold to stick out the top, connected our linking word links and voila! A rainbow of linking words cascading into our pots! Here are some pictures of the kids in action. I will post photos of the finished products hanging from our ceiling tomorrow.
Click on the links below to see some rough draft examples of students who have typed up a piece of persuasive writing for you. Do you feel persuaded? Please visit their sites and comment below. We’d love to get some good, constructive feedback. We use STARS (things we think someone did really well!) and WISHES (things we think the student could improve on) when we critique each other’s work. Your feedback is valuable!
To celebrate Dr. Seuss’ birthday today we all became a Lorax! We read this wonderful story and created this very personal, very silly hats!
Our Valentine’s Day party this year was on Thursday the 12th due to the fact that we did not have school on Friday or Monday. We had a fantastic time! The students decorated their bags during the day and in the afternoon we played games, ate lots of treats, decorated cookies and passed out Valentines. I know a lot of students from our Quadblogging Buddy classrooms had commented and asked about our Valentine’s Day Party so I am including a slideshow of photos for you to enjoy!! I’d like to read some comments or posts about YOUR favorite event or moment from your Valentine’s Day party. Did you get any extra fun or special valentines? I know Mrs. Quigley’s class had a fun competition for their box decorations- how fun!
This is the first week of our Quadblogging experience and the students worked hard today to create Google Drive surveys with lots of questions to gather data from our Quadblogging Buddy classrooms. We should have them all up tomorrow, but if you’d like to see some completed ones, click on the links below. We also are working on creating videos in groups of our school, teachers, students and classrooms to help you see a little about us . Our goal is to have our videos done and posted on our blogs by Friday!
Here are some blogs to check out!
Valentine’s Day in 815 on PhotoPeach
On this past Thursday our students participated in a wonderful music concert with the theme of Circus, Circus! The colors, costumes, singing and dancing were all so fantastic! Our class had a number of students who were in the Kazoo Band, had lines to memorize or small parts to sing. It was also great to see all the families who came out to see their children perform. I am posting some pictures and short videos below of the students in action!
In our classroom we have a very elaborate classroom economy that involves maintaining a checkbook, writing checks, earning money, setting goals and creating plans for saving and spending. All year one big goal that we have discussed is the opportunity for students to purchase their desks. Currently they pay rent on their desks, but once they purchase them, they will no longer have to pay rent, which will free up even more money to save or spend! This week during Bank Day, we found that three students were able to reach their goal of buying their desks!!!! This means that they were able to pay rent for the month of January and had saved $1,300 to purchase their desks. That is a lot of money! Congratulations to Luke , Luisa, and Caleb!! I’m sure we will see even more students reach this goal next month! Keep up the good work.
Dear Students: For those who visit our blog who are unsure of what our economic system is, do you think you could start a dialogue in the comments below with each of you adding a new detail about how our system works? Think about all the tiny details that make our classroom work so efficiently with our economic system! I can’t wait to see all of your ideas.
Many of our students have been tracking their visitors using the Clustrmaps Widget and have been amazed to see the visits they are getting from all over their world! We are learning about where these countries are in relationship to U.S. and where other states are in relationship to our state of Ohio. This weeks challenge focuses on creating connections with bloggers around the world.
1. Look at your Clustrmap and choose a country or a state you think it would be fun to learn about.
2. Look at the list of classes and students that are signed up for the Edublogs Blogging Challenge by clicking on the links.
3. Choose a class or student from that country and comment on explore their blog. Don’t forget to comment!
4. Research the country or state you have chosen. Write a post that includes all of the information you gathered. You can use any search engine to find new information!
5. In your post include pictures that relate to the country or state you have chosen.
I can’t wait to see and share all of the countries or states that we have taken the time to learn about! You have one week… get ready to research!
This is Disability Awareness Week and we will be having many discussions about disabilities and the many ways that make each of us special . We have also been learning about THEME this week in Reading. We learned that the theme is THE MEssage that the author wants us to take away. We can find the theme in movies, music and books! We even read the book Junkyard Wonders by Patricia Polacco. In this book it talks a lot about the theme of acceptance, as well as many other themes.
The video below is a video of a girl who participates in the Special Olympics. I want you to watch the video and think deeply about connections you might have to this girl. How you may be similar to the young people that participate in the Special Olympics? How it must feel to train for these events? Think about the challenges these Olympians have faced. Visit this link to see a video about Susie Doyen. Can you make any connections to her feelings or experience? What is a theme that you think of when you watch this video?
Write a post on your blog referencing this video, attaching a link for your visitors and discussing theme and the connections you have.
Remember to use C.U.P.S., use an address like “Dear Class,” or “Hello Friends,” and end with a closing such as “Love, Mrs. C.” or “Your Friend, Sevey”.
This week we have begun learning about theme! This is a really fun topic to teach and learn this time of year because our students already have some schema (background knowledge) about making inferences and they are all learning how to be insightful readers that think critically. Theme is challenging though in that it is not literal (unless you are reading a fable). Our students must be able to look at the events in the story and then determine what the author’s central message is. We discussed how the theme is THE MEssage. I’ll be posting more pictures tomorrow of the students hard at work making their own anchor charts and completing graphic organizers.
If you are in our class and you did not yet watch the Flocabulary video on Story Elements, please scroll down to our last post and check it out! If you did not have a chance to fill out the survey on Story Elements and Theme, please try this link :
