Turkey Trot: Southeast's Thanksgiving Community Walk

We had a great time today at Southeast's Turkey Trot! I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving and enjoy the days off with family. I will be writing some overdue posts about what we've been up to in the past couple weeks over the weekend. :) 

Make the Sum

Today we played a new game in math called Make the Sum. The game is great for practicing basic addition facts. Students use a deck of cards with numbers 0-10, and choose a target number between 5 and 10. Partners then take turns drawing cards from the deck and laying them next to the draw pile. As students draw cards and lay them out their job is to find pairs that add up to their target number. If they find a pair that works they take both the cards and keep them. The game is over when the whole deck is gone or there are no more matches that can be made. Whoever collected the most cards wins! This would be an easy game to play at home to practice basic facts using a regular deck of cards. You would simply have to assign cards as 0 and 1 and remove the other face cards. 

Scarecrow Fest

We had a great time today building our scarecrows! Thank you to all of the volunteers who really made it great, and to all who were able to send old items in. We use this event to talk about teamwork and it really wouldn't have worked without each volunteer, each student's ideas, and each item that was sent in.

Small Moments Writing

Our writer's workshop is in full swing! We have entered the second week of our Small Moments unit. In this unit students practice narrative writing by telling true stories about their lives. Some key parts of this unit have been understanding the writing process, telling events in order, and zooming in on one small moment to tell a great story. This week we are focusing on bringing our stories to life. Today we learned that writers bring their stories to life by "unfreezing" their characters and making them talk and move. We worked together to revise one of my own stories and add some actions and dialogue. You would be amazed at the amount of writing these young authors are doing each day. They are full of stories to tell! The class has worked together to build some charts that help us remember what we've learned about writing. Take a look at some of the things we've worked on below! 

Sharing in Class Meeting

One part of each day's class meeting is sharing. This is a time for students to practice speaking and listening skills with each other. Today we shared about our weekends with partners. We used some of the skills that we've been working on when we partner shared: we said at least two sentences about our topic, we listened carefully, and we asked respectful questions to each other. After partner sharing a few volunteers shared out what they did this weekend. Then we played a game called Who Remembers which tests our listening skills. As students share I make notes and then I quiz the class on what was shared. We have some great listeners in our classroom! 

The Little Old Lady Who Wasn't Afraid of Anything

Today we did a special activity surrounding the book The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything. As we read we worked on making predictions and inferences. Afterwards, we began to build our own scarecrows from the different items in the book. If you haven't heard the book you can listen to the story read aloud or listen to the song about the story below! 

Read aloud: http://youtu.be/LdrH2TqMeg4

Song:

http://youtu.be/5fvUFo-Y0ZM

Buell's Orchard

We had a wonderful time on our field trip today, and perfect fall weather! On our field trip to Buell's Orchard we got a tour of the orchard, picked our own apples, saw how apples are processed and stored before going to the grocery store, tried apple cider, and ate lunch outside at the orchard...all before recess! Thank you so much to our chaperones- Mrs. Johnson, Mrs. Kravet, and Mr. Cartier - for helping us have a great trip.