Back in the swing of things

Fortunately, today seemed like we had never left for 2 weeks and only returned yesterday! I'm so thankful that it only took us one day to get back to our schedule. 

We began our day with our M4T and then met for meeting where we greeted each other with a compliment. This time, we made sure to give and receive compliments. This prompted a conversation though, about thoughtful compliments. Telling 5 people that you like their hair doesn't really make the compliment authentic. We shared our personal goals for 2016 and I'm very impressed with the level of maturity and self-reflection these kiddos have! We ended meeting with the Pledge of Allegiance as always but first, we played, "Just Like Me!" In Word Study this week, we are trying to learn and USE as many new vocabulary words as possible. Today, they were given 4 new words and the choice to write about one of them. What word did your kiddo write about? Can they USE it for you? We continued our writing in Writer's Workshop but some are starting to get behind so help them to work at home to get caught up! In The Beaded Moccasins, Mary finally has a friend to talk to but she was forced to think about her "future" with the Delaware...marriage? children? We also read a couple of poems from Oops! by Alan Katz to show how poems primarily use word play and figurative language to get the meaning across. Then, we read the poem, Good Hot Dogs in our StoryWorks and completed some comprehension and analysis questions. We had Art, lunch and INSIDE recess today (thankfully because some kiddos had shorts on yesterday and only sweatshirts-no coats!). After recess, we had a lesson on fossils with Dr. Donna, a guest teacher/professor from OSU. She read, Barnum's Bones to us and then we had to use cooperation and teamwork to put a puzzle of dinosaur bones together. In Math Workshop, we continued building our fraction number sense by completing a few activities where we had to compare shares of lasagna (by the way, hardly anyone knew what this word was until I pronounced it...LOL!) and weird pieces of cake. Students decided today if they feel they are ready for the test or not. Here are their choices--fyi:

If your child is NOT yet ready to test, please help them to practice at home with comparing, ordering and equivalent fractions. We also had some time for Social Studies today so we read about Europeans and the Ohio Country and how the French and English were battling over this land...what about the Native Americans though? Our day ended with Wonder/i-Time. If you are curious about what your kiddo does during Wonder time, we began keeping a log so that we can make sure to best utilize this educational time-make us better not just free time.