Garbology in Action

We had a great time sorting some trash!!!  Our next step is to calculate the data and figure out a way to conserve the amount of waste that we take to our landfills every day.  It's pretty scary actually!

Banana Breakdown Day #1

 Today we created our groups, began to make group names and posters based on our variables, and made up our variable bags.  In banana breakdown we are going to be observing decomposition.  One group has a peel with water, a peel with holes in it for air, a peel with dirt, a peel that will be exposed to sunlight, and then there is the control peel.  For the next two weeks, we will be making observations and reporting out.  We're soooo excited! 

All "Appout" Me

These pictures are from last week but I loved this writing piece as we were trying to getting to know one another.  The kids were given a prewriting (brainstorming) paper that looked like an iphone.  All of the "Apps" were the pieces that were all about them.  They loved it and I when I modeled my writing they learned something unique about me as well.  Ask them to see if they remember what was really different about me?  Anyway, here are some fun pics of our kiddos writing away!

Flocabulary Unit 1

Check us out!  We are loving our Flocabulary!  There is an optional Flocabulary crossword that came home today and then the lyrics are on there too if you want to check out what they are singing, lol! 

http://youtu.be/1mapPWiSSEQ

learning links change

There has been a change in our learning links schedule.  We now have health and wellness on Monday's and Music on Tuesday's. 

Where everybody knows your name...

Today was our first day with everyone!!!!  We had a great time!!!  We are all learning each other's names, which most of us know, but more importantly our personalities, strengths, and weaknesses.

This has been very helpful as we have been implementing math workshop.  We are learning new math games to have as a choice, we got on sumdog today, ipads, and then time with me. Some math games that we have done include power tower, addition jenga, and addition top it. All of these games are focused on learning math facts. This will not always be the same but we will introduce new games gradually. Power tower is with flash cards and dixie cups.  Every fact that you get correct you get to put a cup in place to start your own tower.  Addition jenga is jenga with math facts on the blocks.  If you are able to successfully able to pull one of the block out of the tower and answer the problem correctly then you can add that block to your own tower.  Addition top-it is like war but instead pulling two cards and adding them together the highest gets the cards.  We are using number grids to check each others facts. 

I do want to comment to say that I did not make these games up.  They were all seen on other blogs; guided math, chasing cheerios, and then everyday math introduced me to addition top-it.

Try some at home.  I will try to post some pictures next week during math workshop of the children enjoying these games!

Happy first day!

We had a great day today and I'm sure tomorrow will be just as much fun for all of us!