Skyping with Mrs. Price's Class in Australia

We had a very busy day and lots of schedule changes. We had to live our other motto of "go with flow like seaweed in the ocean" many times. But we all did a great job handling all of the changes.

Now that daylight saving is in effect, we can Skype with Mrs. Price's class in Australia. We have one hour of overlap in our days - our last hour of school is their first hour Their school year is almost over - it ends on our winter break. They are excited for summer while we are getting ready for winter. In February when they come back to school, Mrs. Price will have a whole new class. Thanks Ms. Jen for helping try to get a few photos during this crazy time.

Skyping with Mrs. Price's New Class

Yesterday we Skyped with Mrs. Price's new class in Australia. Earlier they had sent us videos of each child introducing themselves to us but today we got to Skype with them and introduce ourselves. This will be the last time we Skype with them this school year because the time will change while we are on Spring Break and we won't have any times that will match up in our school days after that. We will still be able to send them videos, emails and tweets, though. We learn so much each time we connect with them. One cool fact that we learned yesterday was that the national animals of Australia are the kangaroo and emu. This is because they are the only animals who can't move backwards and Australia wants to be moving forward. Very interesting!


Homework ~ Read a good book or two. Check out a Bedtime Math story.

Venn Diagrams

As we are learning more and more about life in China and Australia, we have been trying to capture some of our learning in Venn diagrams. We began with a Venn diagram on the similarities and differences between the United States and China and then JP suggested we start one on the similarities and differences between our class in the United States and Mrs. Price's class in Australia. So now we have two Venn diagram to hold our thinking and ideas.

Homework ~ Read a good book or two. Check out a Bedtime Math story.

Skyping with Australia

Two years I "met" Joan Price, a teacher from Australia, on Twitter. We became friends (we can talk for hours when just the two of us are on Skype) and connected our classrooms. I have been anxiously awaiting the time when I could introduce my crew this year to her class. We had to wait until we switched to daylight saving time in order to have any school time in common. Today we Skyped with them for the first time at 3 pm our time which was 9 am Tuesday morning for them.  Her class is a Prep class. Prep is comparable to our Kindergarten. It was exciting to get to see and hear them today. Sadly, they could see us but couldn't hear us so we improvised and wrote messages to them on a whiteboard. Ask your child to tell you all about the things we have learned about them.

Note ~ The Book Fair will be held in the library all this week. We were all very excited to visit the fair this morning. A special evening of family activities has been planned for November 17th from 4:30 to 7:30 pm. Please be sure to stop by the book fair one day this week.

Homework ~ Read a good book or two. Check out a Bedtime Math story.

Important Dates
11/16-11/20 Fall Climbing Week ~ Belayers needed, sign up here: Fall Climbing Belay Sign Up
11/16-11/20 Book Fair Week ~ Family Night 11/17 from 4:30 to 7:30 pm
11/20 Thanksgiving Lunch at 12:25 Thanksgiving Lunch Sign Up
11/25-11/27 No School ~ Thanksgiving Break
12/4 Fieldwork to Joyous Chinese Cultural School - more information coming soon
12/18 Fieldwork to Pacific Ocean Market and Kings Land Restaurant - more information coming soon
12/21-1/4 No School ~ Winter Break

Tweeting Advice to Mrs. Price's Class

This afternoon we spent a little time tweeting our advice to Mrs. Price's class. This year she has all Preps (kindergarten students). We thought that since they are just beginning their school career they might like to hear our thoughts and advice to help them have a great year. This was a small service learning project for us - the service part was giving advice to younger students and the learning part was learning how to tweet and also reflecting on what kind of advice might be helpful to younger students. Click here to see all of the tweets on our class Twitter page. Below are screenshots of the tweets. We used the hashtag #prepadvice.

It was exciting when we began to get some responses, too.

In case you are wondering Mrs. Price's avatar is a picture of Wonder Woman, it is because primary grade students are so full of wonders that their teacher must be a wonder woman.

Homework
No homework for the weekend. Enjoy some great books with your child.

IA
Our IA next week is PE.

Skype Call to Australia

Yesterday we Skyped with Mrs. Price and her class and other students from her school. We got to meet her new class of Preps (Kindergarteners). What shocked us most of all was that there are only 9 students in her class. Wow, just wow! Our crew quickly pointed out that we have many more students since we have 25 students. We told them about our recent snow storm, our upcoming Voyage and how we made polygons in Math. They told us about an Arts and Crafts Festival that they had and some new caterpillars that they have in their classroom. We enjoyed chatting with them. It was also very nice to see Regina again.

The view from here

The view from there

One of their caterpillars

The second part of today's post is about last Friday. We had so many students absent that I had a hard time trying to pull my reading groups because so many students were missing from each group. I finally decided that this was a good day for me to just spend a little time with the crew during station time. It is nice to just get to hang out with the kids for a little bit, too. We had a lovely time.

Homework
Reading ~ Read a good book or two.
Math ~ Home Link 7.5 Practicing with Fact Triangles