Making Every Minute Count. . .

I am so sorry for the lack of action around here.  I have really been trying to make every minute that I have left of summer count...hanging out with the boys, napping, and shopping!

Last week I was one of the busiest weeks of my life, and then it hit me this week that my summer is officially over...yikes!!!  This week I've had training for 3 days, next week I'm finalizing my classroom and meeting with teammates, the next week I have 4 days of training, and the following week-the madness begins and we report back full time-those first few weeks are so so crazy!

For those who are participating in the letter exchange or who recently expressed interest, be on the look out for more information by August 1st.  Everything is almost ready to go-thank you so much for your patience!

I still have a ton of "how-to" ideas and fab finds to post, but before I get back to that I wanted to share my presentation from CAMT.  You can take a look at it below if you're interested.  My sessions went well, and I think overall it was a great learning experience.  I literally spent all summer researching (and buying) books, preparing the presentation bit by bit, and making stuff with my handsome little Christian-so go easy on me!  I burned a lot of midnight oil while trying to get it wrapped up, and at one point I thought I wouldn't finish in time.

Along with the presentation, I created a pack of math tools and resources that you can use along with the literature.  The pack has ideas for addition, subtraction, problem solving, patterns, fractions, time, money, and more!

You can grab a copy {here}, but the first 5 bloggers to take a quick scroll at the presentation and leave a comment about their favorite activity or book-will get a FREE copy!
CAMT '11 Presentation

sum-sum-summer's coming!

  We're smack dab in the middle of a graphing unit, and I'm lovin' it!  

Here are a few of my favorites. . .

 How do you like to beat the summer heat?

In case you're wondering about the empty "what did we learn" space...I looked at the clock during math this afternoon, and we had 4 minutes to pack and prepare for dismissal! 

math journal entries about "beating the heat". . .

We wrote these questions after our graph was constructed.  Creating and answering the questions is much more complex than making the graph, and has really "stretched" my students' thinking skills!

 

and lfinally. . . one of my favorite graphing resources!

We are counting down and waiting with anticipation.  

To those who are finished up with another school year-congrats! 

 To those who are still on this journey. . . hang in there!

The week in review. . .

This week I have been showered with an abundance of hugs, cards, and things from my "favorite things" list!  

I am so appreciative of supportive and caring families.  I love these cards because they have have such sweet little messages inside...

We worked on cause and effect this week, and did a lot of great activities.  Here are some cards that we sorted as I introduced "cause and effect."    

Cause and Effect Mini Unit

 We also worked on two prefixes (re and un).  Here are a few books that worked wonderfully with the lessons.

We used dictionaries for a vocabulary activity.  Students worked in pairs and small groups to write their own definition, write the dictionary definition, write the word in a sentence, and illustrate the word.  I used words with basic prefixes such as:  words recycle, impossible, unkind, unhappy, return, review, and prehistoric.  

Vocabulary Connection

We worked on our own class book of "fortunate" and "unfortunate" events. This connected to cause and effect really well, and the students had a great time thinking about their own life experiences.

 We've been writing lots of poetry lately and have begun working on a "poe" tree display in the hall.

I love this book because it's full of great poems about all sorts of things.

 So far we have learned about the couplet, cinquain, and limmerick.  Next week we'll learn about several others.  When we're done, we'll have a giant "tree map" with 7 different kinds of poems, an example that we've written as a class, and their characteristics.  I know that April is poetry month, but our scope and sequence has poetry near the end of the school year.  Even though we work on poetry all throughout the year with our poetry notebooks, rhyming words, syllables, and other word work activities that are poetry related, we really focus on the different types of poetry and their elements during the final six weeks of school.

 

The Mother's Day gifts turned out great, and we put the final touches on them today.  Hopefully the students will remember to shower their mom's with hugs, kisses, and presents this weekend!

To end our week we celebrated "Cinco de Mayo" (better late than never) with some fun literature and a small taste test!

The kids did a wonderful job using this triple venn diagram. 

Have a great weekend and Happy Mother's Day to all the hard working momma's out there.  I'm heading out of town to hang out with my three handsome men and to surprise my mom and grandmother! 

Measurement Mini-Unit

I didn't take nearly enough pictures during out "measurement-mania" unit, and I really wish I had taken tons. My kids loved measurement and seemed to grasp it very well as it was connected to hands-on, real world experiences.  Their favorites were measuring length with flowers that they painted, using cheez-its to learn more about area, and measuring "big foot" with various measurement tools.  "Big-foot" was actually just one of Mr. Perry's shoes that we used to measure the length of our feet.  They also enjoyed seeing how tiny Solomon's and Christian's are in comparison to theirs and especially Mr. Perry's.  Surprisingly, I had a few students whose feet were the same size as mine or slightly larger (a couple of very tall boys)!

Every day we discussed a different type of measurement and the tools that we use to gain information about it.    I printed the pages that are in the document below, laminated them, and used sticky notes to record information on them.  We began with  the why, when, how, and what's of measurement.  A great introduction to this is to bring in pairs of shoes that are too small or too tight.  Measurement is such an important skill for students because time, temperature, length, weight, capacity, perimeter, and area occur in every day life more often than we realize.

Measurement Mania

The incredible edible egg. . .

Here's a short activity that can be used for graphing and problem solving.  It will connect perfectly with any "egg" or "Easter" literature that you might use this week. . . Here are a few of my favorites!

             

  
egg graphing and problem solving

Something to Shout About!

This week we're our phonemic awareness skill are "ou" and "ow".  Here are a few cute ideas that my class has enjoyed so far.  The book in the picture above is full of short poems which are perfect for primary learners.  They're short, funny, and have fabulous illustrations.  Today we talked about how April is national poetry month, and we promised to read at least one great poem every single day for the rest of the year.

Here's a copy of our poem of the week.

my cow_poem

I love this book because it is so comprehensive.  It has word families, consonant blends, digraphs, vowel combinations, prefixes and suffixes, and short skill assessments.  This week we're making the "ouch" and "own" books.  This is also a great tool for students because they store them in a ziploc bag inside their book boxes.  They can study their weekly spelling words and get accurate spellings for words that they're not sure about.  

I also love this book because it has so many open ended word sorts.  There are lots of ways to use this book with students of all levels.  I can adjust the parameters of the sort for my students depending on their phonemic awareness strengths and reading abilities.  My higher students like to use these as a word challenge to see how many different ways the words can be sorted.

On Monday we made these sunflowers and brainstormed lots of  "ow" words.  

We also read this book to learn more about the life cycle of  asunflower.  

Today we focused more on "ou."  We read "Arthur's Boo Boo's," and then each student completed a 

text-to-self connection about an injury or "owie" that they've had.  Most of the students are still working on theirs, but here is an example.  

I think they look so dang cute, and I guess I never really knew how much a neon colored band-aid could put a smile on a little one's face!

We're working on measurement in math right now so we got those sunflowers out again.  Each student's flower was just a little different.  They all had different lengths for their stem, petals, and leaves.  They measured their flowers and other items from around the room using snap cubes.  

We also painted these flowers for more measurement practice tomorrow.  We'll use paper clips, bear counters, snap cubes, color tiles, and crayons to measure these tomorrow.  

 

It's amazing how much six and seven year olds love to paint!

Tomorrow we're having a "sour" taste test with sour jelly beans, sour straws, and pickles. We'll graph the and analyze our results.  I can't wait to snap pictures of those cute little "sour" faces!