Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

See you next year!!

Card Making for projectsbyjen.com...

Our trip to Bethabara!!

Week of December 1, 2014

Reading:  We finished up our unit on Our Neighborhood at Workcommunity by reading a story about Mr. Kang's grocery store.  The kids enjoyed discussing what types of jobs Mr. Kang must do to take care of his store.  We also got the LeapFrog globe out and looked at where Korea is in Asia.  This week we also read a story about firefighters! 
Next week? We're starting a unit all about weather!


Math:  We have begun our unit on time.  First graders are expected to learn how to tell time to the hour and the half hour. During this past week I pre-assessed each student to see what they know about telling time.  I found that most of our class understands how to tell time to the hour, but we are still working on telling time to the half hour.  
     We began using our STACKS guided math rotations during this week.  So far I've found that I like the small groups, but I think I may go away from having "set in stone" centers for math and instead give myself more freedom so that I can have them all doing games if we need or only have two centers when needed.  
     During the next week we will begin a unit on surveys and reading graphs.  Each student will ask a question to conduct their very own survey.  

Look what was outside our window!

Our 4th and 5th grade chorus got to sing at a local Christmas tree lighting and yours truly was able to accompany them.  : ) 

Christmas time is here...

Guess who is visiting our classroom from the North Pole? It's Garland, Santa's scout elf.  She's visiting us until Christmastime comes and she has to return to help out Santa.  Watch out! Garland flies back home each night to report to Santa who's been good and who's been bad.  And you never know what mischief will ensue when Garland's around! Here are a couple of things we've found in our classroom this week:  

Thoughts for the week:

Thanksgiving Party!

December 1, 2014

Look who's visiting our classroom!!

It's Garland! Our class' elf on the shelf.  Who knows what mischief she might create in our classroom each morning?! The kids know that Garland is watching to see if they should be put on the naughty or nice list.  She does get to fly home to the North Pole each night and report back to Santa!!

We also have some new additions to our math block...

This is the guided math rotation chart that we have started using.  I downloaded the pieces from teachers pay teachers (such an amazing site!).  The kids are divided into small groups based on math understanding and then are assigned to a different rotation each day.  We go through all five rotations in a 5 day period.  The rotations consist of:  teacher-led small group, number work, technology, math notebook, and math games.  I will be adjusting these based on what we need and what center activities I have.  Basically each 5 day rotation will have 4 center-type rotations with another rotation where the kids will see me in a small group.  We'll see how this goes to see if we need to adjust things.  

We didn't start on the rotations today, but we instead did a whole-group introduction to our new unit about telling time to the hour and half hour.  We learned some new songs and then completed a worksheet to see how much we understand about telling time.  

Below is my new math word wall.  It's a little crooked (I must have been half-asleep when stapling!) and these words are the vocabulary words from the previous unit.  My goal is to have all the math vocabulary on laminated cards that have pictures illustrating each concept.  I haven't been referring to this word wall with the kids and this is something that I need to do to make sure the kids are using this as a reference.  I might also think about tweaking this to try and have all the math words we know to continually stay up.  Now just to find the wall space...