Assessment Time

We are in the middle of assessments, which is not much fun, but does give us important information.  I wanted to include the students in monitoring their progress and have them help me make goals for the class.  So, we looked at the assessments and discussed what items we had mastered and which items we needed extra help with.  We created plus/delta charts, rubrics, and goal charts.  

Voting

This week, we learned about voting, ballots, and elections.  We decided that we would have an election and vote on which book we would read the following day.  

Students first made ballots for us to use during the election.

The next morning, each student voted on their favorite book and put their vote into a ballot box.

We then created tally charts and counted each of the votes.

And the winner is....

Mrs. McFee!!

In the Garden

This week  in the garden, we built a compost bin!  Students made observations in the garden and shared them with the class.  Then, we learned what compost is and actually built a compost bin.  The students loved working together and helping with each step of the process.

Students observing how much our bean plant has grown.

Students observing changes in our vegetable garden.

Step 1 of the compost bin.

We're making progress!

We've built it!!

When we returned to the classroom, we wrote procedural text for how to build a compost bin in our scientific notebooks.

Measurement

We finished our unit on length and area.  We measured the room and different things around the room using our feet and unifix cubes.  

 After measuring the length of the room, we put the cubes into groups of ten and then into groups of hundreds.  We found out the our room is 452 unifix cubes long!

Students used the square tiles in the hallway to determine the area of different shapes.

We used Kidspiration to create figures with different areas.

Research Round-Up

We have spent the last few weeks reading and learning about nonfiction text.  We have learned about text features, topic, and main idea.  

We started our unit by doing a class research project and going through the research process together.  The topic we picked was the Peacock Butterfly and then we create a giant one to hang in the hallway.

The following week, each student chose a pond animal to study.  We developed questions, used different resources to answer the questions, created a project and then presented to the class.  During our research, we even had an expert come to our classroom to answer questions about our animals!

Students used the computer as one resource.

Students chose which product they wanted to create and then worked on it independently.  

Students presented their products to the class.

Math Facts

We are having a lot of fun learning our math facts.  The first 10 - 15 minutes of our math lesson is devoted to math facts.  We play games each day, talk about which strategy to use, and test ourselves on timed math tests.

Today we played a fun math fact game called The Addition Grid.  As a class, we worked on filling in the grid with the correct sums as fast as we could.

When we were finished with the grid, we discussed what patterns we could see.

Math Fact Bingo - Students make a bingo card.  As I hold up addition or subtraction flashcards, students circle the answers on their board.  First to get three in a row wins!

Double Flip Book - We created a flip book to help us remember double facts.  Each fact has a picture to go with the number sentence.

Math Fact Donut - Students draw a donut with numbers.  The students add from the inside out and write the sums around the edge of the donut.

Making 10 - Students copy the 2 rows of numbers I have written.  They connect numbers to make 10.

Musical Math - Students work in partners during musical math to act out addition and subtraction problems.