Week 16

Students with our guest speaker from Fossil Butte

Artifacts brought by our guest speaker

Student sniffing fossilized poop

Tower built by students during free time

We had a fun week, as always!

Special Guests: We had a ranger from Fossil Butte come to talk to the class.  He brought many neat rocks and fossils with him.  The kids loved it. 

Funny Stuff From Kids: My students often get the word “allergic” mixed up with not liking something.  So they’ll say “I’m allergic to that” when what they really mean is, “I don’t like that.” I find it really cute, although I’m trying to get them to understand the difference and stop saying allergic  because it can be a safety hazard if those terms are used interchangeably!

A student trying to say he can’t concentrate, without knowing that word: “I can’t even hear my brain thinking.”

When our guest speaker from Fossil Butte was here, many of the students referred to him as “Mr. Scientist.”  I thought that was pretty cute. 

This shocked me and cracked me up coming from a first grader: “Edward from Twilight is so cute.  I just want to marry him!”

When our guest speaker arrived in his forest service uniform, a student asked, “Are you a cop?”

During recess and freetime I’ve heard my students debate over whether or not Santa is real.  I get a kick out of listening, and I wasn’t about to interrupt unless it was needful.  One student is says he’s not real because he caught his parents putting gifts under the tree one time.  The other students are adamant that Santa is real, and that kid is just crazy!

Homework: Make sure the students keep up on their homework!  Less students have been turning them in lately.  Please make sure your students get it done.

Social Studies: We had fun learning a little bit about other Christmas cultures.

Math: We’ve been focusing on addition strategies this week.  Students re-learned how to add doubles (2+2, 5+5, etc.).  We also learned an adding strategy called “doubles plus one” (2+3. . .which is the same as 2+2 plus 1).  The kids enjoyed this youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljPKoNJH1Jg

Project Read/Spelling: This week we focused on s blends.  We learned the rule that usually blends that have a “/k/” sound will use c if it’s  a short fat vowel and k if it’s a tall skinny vowel (skip, not scip. . .scam, not skam).   

Speedy Words and Rocket Math: Students are progressing on their facts and instant words!  Our rocket math chart is full, and next week we’ll be having our rocket-building party that the students have earned.

AR: Most students have reached their goal of 20 books for this quarter, and the rest are progressing.   Great job!

Writing: This week for writing we edited sentences (capital, period, doer, and what they’re doing).  We also made Christmas cards and did science writing.

Science: For science this week we had a guest speaker, as mentioned above.  We also did an experiment where I “accidentally” wrote on the whiteboard with permanent marker.  We had to figure out as a class what would take it off.