Quinn's Story

More S.S. games

S.S. Games

Recently we completed research on Native American cultures. Students chose how they would present their research to the class from a choice menu. One of the choices was to create a board game with clue cards. Here we are playing the games that were created.

Reading Buddies

We are having lots of fun with our kindergarten reading buddies! Once a week we walk over and spend a half hour reading to our new friends. We are practicing our fluency and teaching them about strategies good readers use such as using picture clues to make meaning and predicting what will happen next.

Halloween Collage

Drugs Stink

We worked really hard on this and had a fun time performing for the school!

Staff YMCA dancers

Showcase

Rockstar Pumpkin

Here is our pumpkin. Our clues were:

1. My first name is Stacey

2. I sing in a group and I sing solo

3. I am so 3008

Can you guess who I am?

Rocking Out Our Red

Red Ribbon Week News

Wow! Red Ribbon Week is over and we had a great time! We learned about the harmful effects that smoking and drinking alcohol has on our bodies. We watched some cool DVDs about professional athletes and musicians who shared their "natural highs" and discussed our own natural highs. We rewrote the lyrics of a song to include a drug-free message and performed it for the school, and we decorated a rockstar pumpkin for the school's showcase. Our themed days were fun; I like the picture of us rocking out our red in the rockstar glasses! We ended the week with our Halloween celebration. Unfortunately the student vs. staff football game was canceled because of the rain (my knee was thankful), but we always have the student vs. staff bball game to look forward to.

Thumbtack Experiment

We are learning about chance events in math. We did this experiment to determine the probability that a tack would land point down. So far we have completed the experiment and collected the data. Now we need to analyze the data and see where it falls on our probability meter.

Grab-It-Gauge

Here we are testing our reaction time with our grab-it-gauges. We used the data to find statistical landmarks.

model making

Readers Theatre

During enrichment time, while other kids are in choir or band, the rest of us have been working on our reading fluency with readers theatre plays. The students enjoyed listening to each other, and themselves, on the digital voice recorder.

Moon Journal

I took this picture this summer of a full moon. For the month of October, we are keeping moon journals. Students got calendars on Sept. 30th so they'd be ready for Oct. 1st. Each day they have to look for the moon and draw what they see onto the calendar. Then they circle a.m. or p.m. to indicate whether they saw the moon in the morning or at night. If they can't see the moon because of cloud cover, or they just can't find it, then they are to make their best guess as to what it looks like. This homework assignment is to get us thinking about the moon and its different shapes.

This week we spent time each day reading a book or magazine of our choice. Each student wrote me a letter in his or her literature log and told me what they were thinking while they were reading. We reviewed some strategies that good readers use including asking questions, making connections and making inferences. Something we learned about ourselves from an activity that we did with Mrs. Davenport was that as a whole, we LOVE to read!!

science investigation

On Friday we used flashlights, meter sticks, graph paper and protractors. We were simulating the sun shining on the Earth at different angles. We tested the flahlight at 20, 45 and 90 degrees. We are investigating what makes the seasons. Right now we are collecting data and will be analyzing it this coming week. This is one of the first lessons in our new science kits from Battle Creek. This unit is called Objects in the Sky.

Introduction

Our room

Open House

Open House went very well tonight. Thank you to all the parents that were able to make it tonight to listen to my little speech. I hope you learned a little about what fifth grade will be like for your child. I was also happy with the positive responses to this blog. It is my first attempt so all suggestions, compliments and criticisms are welcome. (Well, maybe not the criticism--but constructive feedback is good) :)

Welcome to our blog!

Welcome to our classroom blog! This will be a great place for us to get information, share information and comment on what's been happening in our room. One of my goals this year is to integrate more technology into my teaching and our learning, so this will be a good start!!