All about our week. This one was a good one! I am going to *try* to cram it into my five random things so I can link up with Doodlebugs! But some of them are giant things and this lil ole not-so-experienced teacher has to brag just a little. So I'll try to contain myself and ramblings to five reasonable summaries!
1. The Election Project! Make no mistake friends, this year when asked, "what do you think?" I tend to say.... "that's fine" or "I'll just go with the flow" or "I agree with your idea." As I grow in confidence and comfort, my type A personality WILL come out (for better or worse), but this year I am learning SO MUCH just by "going with the flow." The election project started with getting put into "parties,"which we did by drawing a colored chip out of a bag (2 sets of 13 and one set of 5) to create two big parties and one small, independent party. Each party then had to create a name, slogan, and symbol. We had the Stingers, the Lightning Strikers, and the Helping Hearts. We held primary elections and anyone could run within their party. Parties elected a candidate for the general elections. Then each party set to speech writing and campaigning. Everyone had a job. And what great jobs they were. This project made it fairly easy to include everyone even the Kindergarten students.
This candidate is ready! She is covered in campaign materials: buttons and signs galore!
Making Posters!
Creative Campaigning: This volunteer made a hat that said "vote for Quinn!" on the stove pipe.
This Fourth grade candidate made a shirt to wear on election day!
The back said: I can make a difference!
A Kindergarten candidate showing his ID and signing his name so he can vote.
Voters in the voting booths
Somehow this young voter got ahold of his neighbors stickers for voting.
I almost forgot the "best" part! Our Fourth grade candidate is our new school president! The voter in the above picture, a Fifth grader, her running mate, is the new Vice President! Yay Rhanda!
2. I think I mentioned this book last week. This is our read aloud book. We are on Chapter five and we are finally getting into it. The biggest thing this book has done for us help us connect to our classroom pet, a robo-dwarf hamster named Charly.
In the book, Humphrey goes home with a student who's Mom decides to make a portrait of him. We discussed what a portrait is and then we drew and colored or painted portraits of Charly.
Charly is in her ball. We have not let her run around during school before. It was quite a distraction which was why I hesitated to get her out, but I think if we let her run around more often, it will be a good thing.
3. This little learner has missed two weeks minus this one day that I took this photo. She's been fighting a fever and it has her really under the weather. She is finally on the mend and we have missed her smiling face and can't wait for her return to our class family!
Here we are going over our new flashcards of the week: more color words.
4. Fourth Grade started on a Harvest Moon Reader's Theater earlier in October and were finally ready to perform it. They were uncomfortable but did a great job.
5. Math games galore. These guys are playing math "bump" games, a division game (4th grade), and a four-in-a-row subtraction game.
The end report was that this game was hard. I don't necessarily think that is a bad thing.
Sometimes they have to divide four digits. Hey... it IS 4th grade after all!
Playing a subtraction game. There a ton more of these fun games HERE.
*bonus*
Did you know about this site? Confessions of a Homeschooler
Amazing. I snagged a ton of freebies this morning (since there was some sort of furry conspiracy in my house against sleeping in today)! The downloads look amazing. Check out her sight.
I also snagged a fresh load of math games at www.education.com. I suggest you look there also for grade level appropriate math reinforcement. I found a lot of games that use a regular deck of cards. Love that! Here is one I grabbed today for factoring. Easy and not too much stuff to print and laminate!
I leave you with this: I cannot emphasize enough that we are a class family. Sometimes we don't work through our difficulties appropriately and sometimes we work through them a little TOO much like siblings. So we ended our day today with some Sister Sledge: We Are Family.
You can tell the 4th grade boy in the back row is really getting into it!
There is more to tell this week. It was a good, productive mix of hard work and fun celebration, and some fun hard work! But to keep with the Five-for idea, I will quit now.
No comments:
Post a Comment