Week 9

Kids hunting for the daily witch's brew ingredients

Our visiting Texas reading specialist teaching

Students preparing to launch magnets using rubber bands as a science exploration activity

Students who dressed up for beach day!

Our witch's brew!

This week was a fun learning adventure, as always!

Fun Activities: This week a witch dropped off ingredients and hid them in the classroom each today.  Finally today (Thursday) we put them all together in a witch's brew and ate it up!  The ingredients were: blood drops=hot tamales, colored flies=M&M's, chicken toenails=candy corn, cat claws=sunflower seeds, bat wings=pretzels, butterfly wings=fritos, ants=raisins, earthworms=cheetos.  The kids loved it!

Also, the school earned a beach party this week.  We got to do various beach activities throughout the day, which is much needed when you wake up to snow!

We also had the first birthday in our class this year!  The kids loved doing activities to celebrate that.

Important Reminders: If your child reads twenty books and fills in the sheet, he/she can receive a free pan pizza from Pizza Hut each month through their Book-It program.  These books can be read with you, and this resets each month.  So if you didn’t make it in October, let’s try again for November

Special Guests: Thank you parents who help.  It is such a big help to our class!

We had a Texas reading specialist come to meet with the teachers throughout this week.  She taught a reading lesson to our class.  The students had fun meeting someone from Texas!

We had a parent who works closely with local law enforcement come do a presentation on saying no respectfully when you feel kids are being unkind to you. 

Funny Stuff From Kids: When Mrs. Thrasher from Texas was teaching, one student whispered in my ear, “I like the way she talks!” 

I told the kids I was going to save a piece of writing about what they want to be when they grow up to give to them when they graduate high school!  One student said, “By then, you’ll be as old as [a classmate’s] grandma!”. . .I happen to know this grandma, and she’s in her 70’s.  I’ll still only be in my thirties ! J

One student said this regarding a paper with a print smudge on it, “Teacher, I can’t use this paper.  It has germs on it!”

Outside at recess some kids found some plastic disks less than one inch across.  (They are pieces that pop off of some types of roofing nails.  They must’ve rolled onto the ground when the roof was redone this summer.)  They gathered a handful and said, “Mr. Smith, there are mini Frisbees all over the place!” 

Homework: Please continue doing the weekly homework.  Students get a prize for every 8 homework assignments (one week’s worth) that they complete.

Social Studies: We learned about far away places.  The kids particularly enjoyed learning a bit about Ireland.

Math: In class we’ve been doing worksheets similar to their homework, math-fact practice, and a lesson.  Our lessons this week have been about what this sign means: =.  In particular, we’ve been learning about how to figure out something like 5+?=8, instead of their typical 5+3=?.

Project Read/Spelling: This week’s focus was the nk sound.  It was very similar to last week's, except that the letters were nk instead of ng.  We discussed how the vowel slides down the slide until it bumps into -nk at the bottom, but “e” is scared of ng so they’re never together. 

Speedy Words and Rocket Math: Each student is progressing on their facts and instant words!

AR: Way to go!  Every one of my students reached the goal of 20 AR books passed!

Writing: This week we continued with activities focusing on the basics of a sentence.  Every sentence needs a capital, a period, a doer, and what the doer is doing.  The kids are still struggling with verbs.  Many of them want to put two nouns in a sentence with no verbs.  We’ve been working through that, and I think we’re almost ready to move on.   

Science: This week we watched a Bill Nye video about life cycles.  This enabled me to work individually with students who needed extra help. 

Then we learned how to think like scientists by discovering the best way to launch a magnet using a rubber band.  I tried to really get the kids thinking about what we could try to make it work better.