Dr. Dower Visit

Light Bot - You control a little robot by giving it commands and trying to get it to do what you want him to.

Solar System Simulation - Change the mass of planets/stars and watch what happens!

Dr. Dower came in and did some great stuff with us!
He showed us how exactly gravity and the sun work.
We held the fabric and the sun went into the middle. Then we put other "planets" into the fabric and watched what happened!

How precious is my class? 

I mean really. Look at those shining, happy, learning faces. 

Pick and Choose

This math game is a way of practicing place value and subtraction.
Students have a board full of numbers. They also have a stack of numbers.
Students roll the dice to find out how many tens they are subtracting. They subtract that amount from the first card in their stack. Then when they get the answer, the place a cube on that number on their board.
The goal is to get 5 in a row.. like Bingo.

Math Game

Today to practice our subtraction skills we played a pretty fun game.

It is played in pairs. Each kiddo starts at with 200 points. The first person to get below 0 wins. One person is the "odd" team, the other is the "even" team. 

You roll a dice two times to get a double digit number. If the number is an even number, the "even" team subtracts it. If the number is an odd number, the "odd" team subtracts it. 

Math activity

The best part of creating things on teachers pay teachers is watching my own students use it!

I think math can sometimes can monotonous, however... I really want them to practice their double digit subtraction skills.

I've been noticing that some of my kids are so excited about regrouping, that they do it even when they don't have to!
So I created a sorting activity for them to do!
They had to sort into "more on the floor, go next door, get ten more" or "numbers the same, zero's the game" or "more on top, no need to stop"

This activity came from my regrouping subtraction pack.

Getting ready to sort

Looking carefully

Finished product

Letters

 Such a great book to introduce letter writing!





There are five parts to a "friendly letter." They are
Heading
Greeting
Body
Closing
Signature

I got some great ideas over at Teaching Maddness

Here are some links to some free stationary.
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Pen-Pal-Letter-Favorite-Things-Stationary-25776
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Letter-Writing-Paper-Friendly-Letter-596390

My friendly letter writing packet is here!

Here's our example. I will keep it on the board so that my kiddos can refer to it.

Weather

We are starting our unit about weather.
Here's the Austin American Statesman link we will  be using to log in our weather journals.

The weather TEKS they need to know:

2.8A Measure, record, and graph weather information, including temperature, wind conditions, precipitation, and cloud coverage, in order to identify patterns in the data.

2.8B Identify the importance of weather and seasonal information to make choices in clothing, activities, and transportation.

2.8C Explore the processes in the water cycle, including evaporation, condensation, and precipitation, as connected to weather conditions.

Check out my weather journal pack 

There is a great Bill Nye video about the water cycle.

School Spirit

Here is my class with Woody! We won him for the month by having the most kids participate in the most recent spirit night. 

School spirit! 

Will "MineCrafted" this picture for me. :)

United Streaming

My school is trying out United Streaming and I wanted to take advantage of it! I made a class list and sent my kiddos their usernames and passwords and now it's time to explain how to do it all!

Instructions:

First go to the website http://www.discoveryeducation.com/

Then at the upper left corner you will see the login.

When you log in, you should see your name along with this

Click on Assignments

Then click on "First Assignment"

There are two different activities to be done.

Science Grant

I got the $500 science grant from the American Chemical Society!!

This money is to be spent for science-related things in my classroom. I am really excited about this. There are many different options to choose from and so many different things I would love to do with the money. I know there's some pretty neat science equipment out there for elementary students! 

This post is simply to share the joy I'm feeling about the grant.

In fact, I would like to write a haiku.

Oh, how to spend you!

Hooray! So many choices!

Thank you ACS. 

Coping with feelings

Did you know this is counselor week?

  Spicewood has absolutely the best school counselor ever. Mrs. Hougham is the best. If you want to read more about our lovely counselor, click here.
Mrs. Hougham talked about good weather days and bad weather weather days. We talked about all sorts of different feelings like sad, stressed, angry... and how to cope with those feelings.
They brainstormed some different reasons why they would have an empty bucket.
One important thing she touched on was the person in charge of how you feel is you!! The person responsible for filling your bucket is YOU!

Thinking about our feelings....

Ms. Hougham demonstrated how it can feel to bottle up all our feelings and how important it is to let out some of those feelings using some of those strategies.

She again talked about Smell The Roses (breathing in) and Blow The Coco (breathing out).

Loooooove that. As the breathe in they say, "I am...." and then as they breathe out, "relaxed." 

We did a meditation about being on the beach and feeling the sand under our toes. 

She taught them the trick of counting down from 100 and even imagining the colors of the digits, which I've never heard before!

As an activity the kids had little pieces of paper that had different scenarios like, "Your big sister goes to college and you feel sad. What can you do?" or "You have so much to do after school, piano practice, sports, and lots of homework. What can you do?" The kids worked in groups to talk about what coping mechanisms to use. 

Where we are in place and time

We are finished with poetry so it's time to start our new PYP unit! This unit is called, "Where we are in place and time,"
The main idea is: Human and geographic factors affect communities.
We sat down and examined each word as a class. We wrote a new main idea together:
"The way people are, and the nature of the earth can change a group of houses, companies, and people, and where they live."

I taught my kiddos the continent song, along with movements to help us remember where the continents are. We looked through atlases and learned about things like equator and compass rose.

Continent song!

In this unit we are also learning about space and the moon. I am having my kiddos keep a moon journal. Every night one of my students takes home a paper bowl to draw what the moon looks like that night. Then they bring back the bowl and we all draw it on our moon journal.
Here's a link to a freebie moon journal.

Raghav was the first to take home the bowl.

Bill Nye has a moon video that I hope to watch with the kids eventually.