Howdy Partner!

We had such a great time on Thursday with our Fall Y'all theme day! 

The boys and girls started the day by working on a boot-stompin' folder that focused on adjectives and compound words and using a Venn Diagram to compare Spring and Fall. I was really, REALLY impressed with some of the similarities and differences students came up with! The great thing about this folder is that the fun continues on Tuesday because we're not finished it yet!  

In addition to writing about our missing horses, we a fun game call Zip,Zap, Zop around the virtual campfire and enjoyed eating "Cowboy Crunch". We also got a kick out of reading "The Gingerbread Cowboy" and we're quite surprised by the very un-Disney ending! Ha-ha! 

Our campfire even had nature sounds and crackling wood!  

For me, it was such a thrill to walk outside to greet my class at the bell in the morning and see an entire line-up of cowboy hats and western duds! Thank you so much to the Room 208 parents for supporting our theme day! 

All you need to make your own "Cowboy Crunch"! 

Please be on time

As your child's teacher, I pride myself in providing the very best learning experience for all of my students.  When children are persistently late, the entire class is impacted. 

Everyone's learning is interrupted so that the teacher can bring the late student up to speed or help them get settled. This interruption of learning and instruction means the teacher needs to modify the lesson in order to make it fit in the now shortened window of time. As a teacher who likes to plan and present dynamic and interactive lessons, I appreciate it when interruptions to my students' learning are minimized.  

Like all teachers at our wonderful school, I need my students at school on time. 

I understand that there are mornings where things go off track and being late is unavoidable. My concern here is around persistent lateness. 

My hope is that moving forward, all students will be delivered to school on time, ready to start their day and enjoy the interesting and engaging lessons I have created for them.  

Week 5...already?!

It's the fifth week of school already! Yikes! Hard to believe isn't it? It might be a short week, but it's packed full of all kinds of great learning and fun activities! 

Let's talk about Math for a bit...we haven't officially begun our first unit yet and we'll likely move into that next week. We've covered a lot of the expectations for that first unit (it's actually Unit 2 of the program), but we haven't "started" it in that official "Hey kids, it's our first math unit!"  way. 

The Math focus over the last few weeks has really been all about reviewing skills, building number sense, talking place value, along with addition and subtraction, and now most recently, problem solving. When I look over the concepts covered in Unit 2: Patterns in Addition and Subtraction, I'm feeling really good about where we are. When we do start the unit, it'll be a fast one. 

I do want to spend some time this week on addition and subtracting with regrouping. The intensive practice will be beneficial in the long run.  I'm finding this is one area where the boys and girls could use a boost in confidence. We're really going to focus here for a few days and then come Tuesday, begin that first official unit.  In addition to looking at basic calculations, I will also incorporate problem solving into our lessons.  It is essential that students can read a word problem and determine the correct operation. We'll talk about those clue words that tell us which operation to use.  

Then we have that big theme day on Thursday! We're having an "It's Fall Y'all" day! The boys and girls are invited to wear their cowboy/girl duds and practice their yee-haws and howdy-partners!  It's going to be a great day!  

Have a look at what else we're up to this week by clicking on the picture below. As usual, I'm sure I've over-planned and we'll likely be carrying things over to Week 6, but that's how I roll. It won't surprise you that my pantry is stocked with those huge Costco bags of flour and enough pasta to feed a small village.  Hey, it's good to be ready for anything! 

A very tasty Fun Friday!

We had a great afternoon today! 
It was an apple-themed Fun Friday! Because everything is more fun with partners, markers and chart paper, we solved some apple-related Math problems using the five (sometimes four) steps to problem solving we discuss in our Morning Message (pictured below).  

This was a great opportunity for me to roam the room and get a feel for where my students are at in terms of their problem solving skills. We're in great shape, that's for sure! We just needed more time and that's my fault for over-planning. I think we should have started this activity in the morning and carried it on in the afternoon, but what can you do.

These are the problems the students had to solve today.
They did theirs on chart paper.  

Early finishers were given a set of sequencing cards. The task was to put the cards in order to make the recipe for the applesauce we enjoyed this afternoon!  

You read that correctly! The kids in 208 enjoyed homemade applesauce today! It smelled positively heavenly in our class! I promised that I would post the recipe on the blog because many students indicated they would be (politely, of course) requesting that their moms make it this weekend.  If you do make it, you MUST get that Starfrit apple peeler from earlier in the week. I peeled 25 apples last night in less than 20 minutes!!! 

Get this apple-peeler!

Today was so, so  great! It was such a nice end to our fourth week together.  Who wouldn't love to hear, "This is the greatest thing I've ever tasted!"  on a Friday! That comment made my day!  

Here's a link to the printable version of the applesauce recipe (I left out the cloves this time 'round).