Writing Celebration

On Friday before Fall Break, we celebrated the end of our Pattern Book Writing Genre Study by inviting Ms. Mary Beth's crew over to listen to our books. We had visited their room to hear their stories on Thursday. We all enjoyed having an attentive audience for our books. While we each wrote several pattern books, we shared the ones we wrote that used When I Was Young in the Mountains by Cynthia Rylant as our mentor text.

In this book, Cynthia Rylant repeats the phrase "when I was young in the mountains" over and over and and tells different things she did when she was young in the mountains. We used that general idea and wrote books called, "When I Went to Camp Elim" or "When I Went to Renaissance". You will be able to see the books we created when you come to Student-Led conferences in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, enjoy a few pictures of us sharing our books with Ms. Mary Beth's crew.

Our next writing genre study will be on Question and Answer books. We will use the topics that we selected earlier as things we were passionate or experts about as the topics for our books. We should all love that!

Homework
Reading ~ Read a good book or two.
Math ~ Home Link 3.3 Number Line Hops
Remember to return library books.

Fall Climbing
 Our school will climb the first three weeks in November. Our crew will climb the week of November 18th. There will be belay trainings on October 23rd and 30th. Everyone who intends to belay must come to a training, either to be trained or to be refreshed. If you are unable to make the trainings you must arrange a time to get trained/refreshed with Mr. Doug. We need your help. The more people we have to belay, the more climbing time each child will get. Thanks.
 
Sign up for the trainings at these links:

http://www.signupgenius.com/go/20F094DADAC229-belay6

http://www.signupgenius.com/go/20F094DADAC229-belay7

Sign up to belay during PE classes here:

http://www.signupgenius.com/go/20F094DADAC229-fall1

Tuesday!

I hope everyone has enjoyed their time off. It will be time for students to return to school on Tuesday! (Teachers will return on Monday.) If your child needs a little something to look forward to, then please show them this picture:

It arrived in my mailbox last Thursday - hot off the presses - the newest Elephant and Piggie book. I can't wait to read it to the crew on Tuesday. It is so good!

Please help your child remember to bring back his or her library books as they are all due on Tuesday.

I have really enjoyed reading the blog posts written by the crew on break. They had some interesting things to share. Encourage your child to write a post to share the things he or she has done over break. I had a wonderful trip to the beach in Florida and look what I found:

A few of the shark's teeth that we found on a beach in Venice.

I can't wait to get back to school and see the crew and hear all about their adventures. I have missed them! See you all on Tuesday.

Interesting Links
Two links for you on the importance of sleep in brain development:
Regular Bedtimes Tied to Better Behavior
Sleep 'cleans' the brain of toxins

One link to share with your children:
What A Week Of Groceries Looks Like Around The World

Boot Camp Part 2

Our crew parent, Amy M., was kind enough to take pictures during Boot Camp for us. (I did not even wear my glasses outside because I knew that they would soon be snow speckled and I wouldn't be able to see.) Enjoy the slideshow below. If you get this post by email, you will need to click through to go directly to the blog to view the snowy pictures.

Boot Camp

Boot Camp was loads of fun even with all of the snow. Enjoy the few pictures below. I didn't take my camera out in the snow so we just have some pictures in the gym when we were doing drills with the soldiers. We won the tug of war against the soldiers. It was very exciting!

IA
Our IA after break will be Music.

Have a great Fall Break! See you in a couple of weeks.

Showing What We Have Learned

Most of you have seen the ShowMes that we create and post on our blogs. I wanted to give you a bit of the background for these. I use these as a way to assess what students know and can do. I learn so much about each student when watching a ShowMe that he or she has created. It helps me know what that child needs to work on or learn next. I have created a system that allows each child to keep track of what they have learned. I created a checklist of things that they can use to generate ideas for ShowMes. This list is based on the long term learning targets that we are currently working on.

For example, the checklist list below was based on the learning targets in the next picture. Students can show what they know and have learned in a ShowMe. We still have other types of assessments (like tests) but ShowMes give me so much more information. Click on the picture to see a larger version. Check out your child's Kidblog to see which of these learning targets he or she has demonstrated in a ShowMe.

Our most recent learning targets. We will have a new ShowMe checklist for these soon.

Homework
Reading ~ Read a good book or two.
Math ~ Home Link 3.2 Odd and Even Numbers
Bring a lunch from home for Boot Camp tomorrow.

Shelfari

Wondering what we are reading in class? Looking for a good book to read with your child? Check out our Shelfari online bookshelf. Each day the teacher's helper adds the books we read aloud that day to the shelf so we can keep track of all of the books we have read. You can see a small bookshelf on the right-hand side of this blog. It shows the most recent books we have read and is updated each day. To see more of our shelf, you can click on the previous and next buttons to see other shelves. You can also go to our Shelfari page to see a large view of the shelf. Watch our shelves fill as we move through the year.

Adding books to our shelves.

Click on the picture to visit our Shelfari page.

Homework
Reading ~ Read a good book or two.
Math ~ Home Link 3.1 Patterns

Library
We have library tomorrow. Please help your child remember to return his or her books.

Morning Meeting

We begin each day with a morning meeting. We have a regular list of items that happen in each meeting. We read our Morning Message, we say the Pledge of Allegiance, we greet each other, we have a sharing time, and we do an activity.

Our Morning Message tells us a little bit about our day so we all know what to expect. We have a variety of ways that we greet each other during our greeting time. Sharing time is not like show and tell. It is a time to learn more about each other. Sometimes we all share by answering a common question and sometimes we choose 3 people to share something about their life. We all look forward to the part of the meeting. The activity portion all has a lot of variety though some things stay the same from week to week. We always drum on Monday morning and we always have Stewardship Day on Tuesdays. During this time we clean out our desks and clean up the classroom. The rest of the week varies.

One recent activity we did was to line up in order. We each had a card with a number on it and we had to count by 2s to get in order. The tricky part was that we were not allowed to talk to each other while getting in order. We had to communicate in other ways in order to be successful. We were so proud when we did it as you can see in the photos below.

Trying to find our places

The beginning of the line is in order.

The end of the line is in order, too.

Homework
Reading ~ Read a good book or two.
Math ~ Home Link 2.14 Unit 3: Family Letter ~ Visual Patterns, Number Patterns and Counting