You are Invited...

It's almost that time!  We have been spending LOTS of time in class - in all areas - working on getting our Wax Museum project ready to go.  This week we planned our costumes by looking at pictures of our famous Americans.  We talked about what we would need to look like that person and what each person would be holding or have near them to represent what they had accomplished.

We are also creating an INTERACTIVE  timeline of famous Americans in PowerPoint.  Each timeline point will be a hotspot and when you click on the spot, it will pull up a video (of the student in costume!) telling about that person.

In order to do this we had to practice making a video - that was fun!  We did a practice run and had one person hold the ipad while videotaping someone else talking about themselves.  We watched the videos together and learned A LOT about how to make a good video.  We created our "Top Ten Tips" and posted them on the whiteboard the next day, before we tried again.

Our videos were MUCH better the second time around!  Next week we'll spend time writing our quick informational speeches for both or wax museum and our videos.

If you didn't get the invitation to visit our Wax Museum (sent in Friday folders this week), here's the information:

NOTE:  The Wax Museum is the project Ms. Gamache's readers are doing.  If your child is part of Mrs. Dunn or Miss Carta's reading or writing classes, they have a different project planned :-)

Visitors to the Wax Museum will be treated to an interactive display of famous Americans throughout history that come alive with the touch of a button.  We hope you can join us!

Biographies - Part 1

What do you know about Jackie Robinson?  Amelia Earhart?  Have you heard of Ruth Law?  Or Thurgood Marshall?  These are just some of the famous Americans we've been learning about and boy are we excited!

We've been spending our reading time focusing on biographies, specifically talking about personality traits (character traits) and how the person responds (or responded) to challenges. 

 

After reading a few biographies about famous Americans, we generated ideas for some describing character traits.  We also learned some new words we could use to describe many of the people we were learning about.



We went back to the texts to find things the men and women said and did that supported our ideas.

We worked on locating key details by color coding texts and looking carefully at the illustrations and in the text.

We "walked the room" reading fact cards and finding main idea and details.

And we did some online research, too!

We learned SO much about so many people and can't wait for Part 2 - a fun biography project we'll be starting next week! Stay tuned!

Peek at Our Week

Woo-hoo!  We FINALLY had a full week of school last week!  Would you believe it has been SIX weeks since that has happened?  (Longer if you count the December break!)  We were really busy this past week so I thought I'd share a bit of everything from our classroom world.

All this snow has left us really looking forward to spring!  Our beautiful amaryllis plant gave us quite a show with its bright read flowers - and it was HUGE!

Have you seen these books?  We are CRAZY in love with them all!  Each book has facts, photos and more information abut what it would be like to have certain animal parts.  We used these books as a start to our opinion writing and we're almost done with a big display.  Check back next week for the reveal!

The winter months can get a little boring, so we change up our class celebration chart.  Rather than go with a marble jar for great class behavior, now we earn one of the valentine cuties (ready to change for March!).  Earning all 12 cuties means a mini-celebration for us!  We just met our goal again at the end of last week so there will be time in the coming days for a drawing party!

It's time for some Math Missions!  Complete with "Mission Impossible" music and magnifying classes to find clues, we've started on our subtraction with regrouping unit!  (You may know the skill as "borrowing" when subtracting.)  It's important that students understand WHY they regroup ones and tens before they start the actual paper and pencil work - otherwise it's easy to know what to do, but never really understand it!  We'll be taking lots of time - with different math missions! - to practice this skill.

Mr. Putter and Tabby anchored our final week of reading with a friendship theme.  These two characters are great for comparing and contrasting, talking about character traits and seeing things from different points of view.  We read lots of other friendship books and focused on the big question of "How do friends show they care about each other?"

This idea has been BIG in our room this week.  It's the VIP buckets!  VIPs are students who go beyond just what they are supposed to do - in their work and their behavior - WITHOUT having to be reminded.  The VIP (or two!) get to keep the bucket at their seat and use gel pens, smencils, stickers and mechanical pencils.. they get to was at lunch with the smelly soap (love!) and choose their workspot (camping chair or lap desk, anyone!).  Sometimes we have two VIPs, sometimes just one and sometimes none... it just depends who's doing their best ALL the time!

 

 

Wow!  We really were happy that we had a full week of school and could finally try to get back into a routine!  This month of March means focusing on famous Americans and biographies, subtraction with regrouping, possessive nouns and how to have a great conversation.  We are ready for spring!