Dress Like a Pirate Day!

We are learning about r-controlled vowels.  We noticed that when the letter "r" follows a vowel the  "r" becomes very bossy and you can't hear the vowel.  They are kind of like pirates.  Pirates are bossy too. When you read a word with a bossy "r" you can't even hear the vowel.  First, we played a game called Golden Vowels.  The girls started out as the vowels and the boys the Pirates.  Miss Melanie announced a word like "star"., The girls chose the appropriate vowel and then would hide somewhere in the room.  The Pirates would them search for them and when they found them each vowel girl and bossy "r" boy would write down the word.  Then the kids switched places.  They wrote about ten words.
Next, we did a Math game.  We counted Pirate "booty" money and wrote down how much was in each bag.  We are getting good at counting and adding quarters.
Last, we split into two teams and went on a treasure hunt through the school.  Ms. Howell (our student teacher) took one group and Miss Melanie took the other.  We searched the whole school and found the treasures right in our classroom.  We found out we can do almost anything if we work together.  It was a great day with a lot of great learning.

New Years Resolutions Writing Goal

Each child came up with at lease five things the would like to do better in 2017 and why it would be a good goal.  Some of the ideas included dancing to get more exercise or walking more laps.  Reading books and taking tests.  Some kids set a goal to put spaces between their words.  Some said to write better and some kids wanted to be better at Math.  After they finished writing they got to put on a Happy News Years hat a blow a dreaded, loud New Year's horn.  Yikes!

Making Common Core Math Fun

One of the Common Core Math Standards is being able to count and add to 1,000.  This is a daunting task for seven and eight year old kids.  So, we did a whole group activity then broke up into small groups and then completed the activity individually.  Great learning and super fun.  First, as a whole group everyone drew as many stars as they could in two minutes on a piece of graph paper.  Next, they cut their starts apart.  Our goal was to count how many stars the whole class drew all together. They seemed overwhelmed at first. Then, we split up into small groups and glued stars together in groups of tens.  Then glued groups of hundreds.  The groups then glued them onto large papers and counted their stars.  Last, each child estimated how many stars there were altogether.  We added all of the stars together but counting ones first and making tens.  Then we added the tens to make hundreds. Last we counted the hundreds.  All together we made 1,050 stars.  Wowzers, we have some great Math brains in our class especially when they worked together.

Christmas Around the World

We had a great time learning about how people in other countries celebrate Christmas.. We did several activities and made projects to help us remember.  We learned about the Good Witch La Bafana from Italy who is still looking for the Christ child and brings gifts to children and leaves them in their shoes.  We learned that Christmas trees are a tradition brought to America from Germany. And we learned about the Christmas spider from Russia who weaves beautiful webs that turn into tinsel on Christmas trees. Studying other cultures in very interesting.