A New School Year

August is here and the wheels are turning towards the first day of school.  The dreams have started and the plans are under way.  The excitement as the days close in is high.  I look forward to getting to know my new class and the days ahead of learning and adventure!  I sent out this welcome letter to introduce myself to my students.

 View Class Introduction letter here:

Multiplication Flashcards

We are working on memorizing our multiplication facts.  Here is how we are organizing the facts we know, from the ones we need to learn.

Raven's Day

Story telling for culturally responsive literacy.  Two years ago Brett Dillingham, a wonderful story teller from Juneau, came to my class.  He helped me learn an excellent process to help students write and tell their very own stories.  We started off by watching a video of B. Dillingham telling a story and analyzing what makes him a great story teller.

Here is Brett Dillingham's telling of Raven's Day.

Reading Journals - YAY!

Today I introduced Reading Journals to help silent reading be a little more directed.   When students come into class, there will be a picture projected on the promethean board with a reading strategy and questions to answer in their journal.  After they're done responding to the questions, they will have 15 minutes of silent reading time.  They will then have five minutes to respond in their journals connecting their personal reading choice to the strategy they wrote about earlier.

  Here is an example:

REALISM & FANTASY: When you look at this image, think about what could actually happen in a real life setting, and what would only happen in a fantasy setting. List your ideas in a T-chart in your reading journal.

After their 15 min. of silent reading, I would follow up with a question about their book, whether it is realism or fantasy, and have them give an example.  

I have a wonderful source for these reading skill photos and questions.  You can follow her board on pinterest:  Suzy Brook's Reading Skills and Strategies

Planet Brochures

I was looking for a culminating project for our unit on the solar system and I came across this site that had a  great travel brochure project.  The project is a planet report in the form of a travel brochure.  Click the link to see the details of the project.

Planet Brochure Project

I used their project as a template and tweaked the rubric for my students.  I put a couple of kid friendly solar system websites for the students to use on my webpage and they began researching today.

There's a really cute solar system youtube video on one of the sites.  The students enjoyed it.

Earth Day Mosaics

For Earth Day we  learned the art term, mosaic. After observing different mosaics in art I gave students a rough outline of the Earth and they filled it in with tiles.

I would add a speech bubble quoting a fact about conservation of our resources.

Sharpies and balloons

I teach Reading Mastery to a group of eight.  After reading a story about the travels of a fly, we had a rare opportunity to do a project.  We made globes of the world with sharpies and balloons.  We only had one balloon pop.  I had back up paper maps for this instance.  I had them draw the continents and the equator first.  Then we labeled the cities and countries that Herman the fly had visited by plane.  All in all I thought it was a great lesson and I will do this again with the whole class next year.