Fossils-excavation mess!

Our day began in a typical fashion with M4T and morning meeting. Today, I read the book, Someday, by Eileen Spinelli. It's about a girl with big dreams but also realizing what she is doing today so that she can get there in the future. I watched a video on Facebook yesterday and shared the big idea with the kiddos. The speaker asked a guy WHAT he did. He replied that he was a music teacher so the speaker asked him to sing, which he did. Then, the speaker asked him to sing again but like he was at his uncle's funeral and gave him some other details too. This time, when the man sang, it sounded beautiful! This led the speaker to share that the WHY of his WHAT made the difference. He said that our impact is much greater when we have purpose. Everything else I asked of them today was first given with the purpose in mind. Next, we made sure that we were prepared for our tech work with Mrs. Bargar by having our poems ready and analyzed. We made sure we understood the mood, meaning of the poem, emotion we felt by reading the poem and rhythm and/or repetition of the poem.  We showed that we understood our poem by creating a music project in Garage Band. We'll record our poems on Thursday and write and illustrate our poems too so we have a finished project. Special today was Art and then lunch and outdoor recess. We were very specific with writing in our planners today so remind your kiddo to use their planner for it's purpose of reminding them of their work and responsibilities. In Math Workshop, we showed our understanding of fractions of sets and wholes and composing and decomposing fractions using eggs and candy bars. Students are getting more and more secure! :) Finally, we excavated our dinosaur fossils from the milk cartons! It was so messy and we broke a lot of toothpicks digging those little plastic dinosaurs out! We looked at our imprints with and without the pocket microscope and then answered some questions about what our fossils can tell us. This took us all the way to the end of the day.