First Week Fun 2016

Here's a glimpse at the some of the fun activities we did our 1st week of school!

After reading First Day Jitters we discussed its surprise ending, read a "Jitters" poem, wrote about a time we felt the jitters, and even tasted some Jitter Juice, which was judged to be "yummy!"

Another story we read was Molly Lou Melon, which taught us to celebrate our imperfections and "walk proud, smile big, and sing loud". Students identified Molly Lou's character traits, which they posted on our Molly Lou anchor chart. We'll continue to practice identifying character traits during our next few read-alouds.

Our 1st math unit is place value. We rolled a jumbo dice to create 3-4 digit numbers that we wrote in  standard and expanded form...

and using counters and place value mats to form 2-3 digit numerals...

We'll be continuing to practice place value and will review how to round numbers using a "Rounding Rap" and "Rounding Rollercoaster" game this week.

Our 1st writing unit is poetry. We began our study by creating "Types of Poetry" flipbooks to learn about list poems, acrostic poems, diamante poems, haikus, and limmericks...

Students created biography poems mounted on paper plate self portraits, which you can check out on our hallway bulletin board back to School Night. This week our poets will be writing "Fall" list poems, which we'll mount on painted leaves.

Probably the most favorite activity of the week was learning about the scientific method by conducting a S.T.E.M experiment called "Save Fred". (There's a possibility the candy involved had something to do with this.) Teams worked collaboratively to get Fred the gummy worm off his capsized plastic cup boat and into his gummy ring life preserver, which was trapped under the boat, using nothing but paperclips and creative thinking. Students then documented the steps used on a scientific method flow chart...

 

Looking forward to a great year of learning!