Summer Fun

Hi Girls and Boys! I hope that you are all having a wonderful vacation. I can't wait to hear about all that you have been up to! If you want to share with me before we see each other again, feel free to send me an email, I would love to hear about it!
I have been spending a lot of time with friends and family having BBQ's, eating creamees, swimming and riding on my new bike. The picture above is of a camp on a lake that I visit each summer. Whenever I think of a perfect summer day in Vermont, I imagine a sunny day at this camp with my friends and family. We canoed, kayaked, and jumped off a boat in the middle of the lake. Have any of you canoed or kayaked before? It's one of my favorite summer activities. I also took a relaxing break in the hammock with a good book. Have you read a new favorite book this summer? To end the wonderful day we had a campfire and made s'mores. I have also been getting excited for next year and second grade. I stopped in at the school to see how our new classroom space is looking. The project has not started yet, but everything was moved around and it looked quite different. I will take pictures next time to show you!
I found a couple of new fun websites and added them to the blog. One has some fun math games, even a skateboarding game, and the other is a site where you get to create your own Mad Lib by picking nouns, verbs, and adjectives to make a silly story. Check them out on a rainy day and let me know what you think!
I think about you guys all the time and hope that you are just having a great time!

Fun in the Sun!

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Poetry Practice!

I couldn't help but post a couple of little quick clips of the kids practicing their group songs and poems. They have been working so hard for a couple of weeks now and they are all getting excited for the upcoming performance. We hope to see you there to celebrate all of the students' hard work!

Sorting Rocks as Scientists!

Friendly Farmers!

We have begun our final math unit, so hard to believe, on farms! Throughout this integrated unit the students will be using their skills of spatial problem solving, mapping, and computation with money to build a farm with their teammates. The students have really taken to this project and are doing a fabulous job! The class is broken up into four groups with five "farmers" creating a farm together. To kick off the unit we had a discussion about what it means to work on a team and what strategies we may need to use throughout the project. The three C's that have been decided upon as the focus for a successful farm are Cooperation, Communication and Compromise. The first part of this unit that blew me away was how the students immediately used these strategies to come up with the names for their farms; we have The Friend Farm, The Maple Tree Farm, The Greenhouse Farm, and The Animal Farm. When I heard the rich discussion, compromising and problem solving for the names alone, I knew that this was going to be a great unit!
Since that first successful day, the students have begun to purchase land, buildings and animals for their farms. Even though they are working together to design their plot of land, they each have individual wallets to make their purchases with. I have been amazed by the students understanding of money and how to count it. There has been very little hold up as they jump around from counting out 10's, 5's and 1's to make their payments. There has also been an incredible amount of strategizing and team work that has gone into deciding how much land to buy, the number of animals they would like, and where they should be. When purchasing the goats on Friday, I overheard one group discussing that they wanted the goats to have friends so they should buy more than one, but not too many so that they can save money and have space for other animals. There was also quite a bit of discussion about how far away the barn should be from the house, there was quite a concern about how stinky it would be. It is fun to see and hear all that they come up with.
Everyday I hear from at least a few students about how much they are enjoying their time in math and it's easy to see as they all work together!

It's All About Cooperation!

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Happy April and True Spring!

Yay, the sun is out, bright and warm ( I began this during the gorgeous weekend we had)! Phew, let's hope it is here to stay!

I just wanted to update you on a few things that are new in our classroom. The students have been hard at work with our new math unit about Geometry. We have been talking about the many different 2 and 3-Dimensional shapes and their attributes. The kids are becoming familiar and comfortable using a lot of new vocabulary that comes along with talking about shapes. When they have been counting the different characteristics of a shape, they have been looking at the vertex, edges, and faces. We are noticing that shapes can be congruent, but do not have to be. The students have also been working on making designs out of squares to make quilts and today they glued their patches together and a conversation came up that some patches would look the same no matter which way you rotated them, while others would change. When I presented the question on why this was so, the discussion became about the fact that some designs were symmetrical, while others were not and that those are called asymmetrical. I encourage you to ask your kiddos about these new words and have them share with you what they mean!

The students have also been hard at work on our social studies unit on Community. Our definition of community at the moment is centered around the idea that people work together in a variety of roles and there are different kinds of communities, urban, suburban, and rural. They have been having a great time talking and learning about the many different community helpers that work together to make a successful community. The students got to make their own community helpers and I must say, they were very creative! They came up with many such as Police Officers, Fire Fighters, and EMT's, but also a few that are less typically talked about, such as a librarian, a farmer, a vet and even a plumber! Once they finished making their helpers they got to come up with a name for them and write a bit about them. This was great practice of the revision process and I think the kids even surprised themselves with how much they can write and how great it can look. They then got to design a background for their creations and share them with their peers. Today we picked up from where we left off last week and discussed that now they all have these wonderful community helpers and we know how they help the community, but how do they work together? After a discussion about how Fire Fighters and Police Officers team together and Doctors and Nurses, the students each got a square piece of paper to draw two community helpers working together. Once we are finished painting them we are going to connect them altogether with the first graders working in Ms. St. John's room to make a big Community Quilt. Stay tuned for pictures of this soon-to-be beautiful piece of artwork!

Lastly, today was the kick-off of another new unit on Poetry, connected to our end of the year project, which is a Poetry Jam. Coincidentally enough, April is Poetry Month, which could not tie in more perfectly! We began today by making a chart about all the things we know about poetry and all the things we want to know as we begin this new study. It was interesting to hear that according to the students poems must rhyme and they must be long. They were quite stunned when even just today by reading a few poems we discovered that that is actually not the case. I explained that one of the most unique and fun things about poetry is that it really does not follow any of the writing rules that we have been learning about. Punctuation and capitalization is not a requirement (this was a biggie) and that you can actually make up words! For the next month, we will be reading, reciting, and writing all kinds of different poems. Stay posted as we dive deeper into the wonderfully wacky world of poetry!