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. :)