Happy Chinese New Year!

We celebrated Chinese New Year today in Leon's honor! We read books, had oranges and candy (signs of luck for the new year) and made dancing dragons, red lanterns and lucky money envelopes. We even tried to use chopsticks! (If your kiddo has a special celebration they'd like to share with us, let us know!)

We began our day with M4T and then shared about our weekend in meeting. Those in Heritage Lakes had a pretty eventful one with the house fire in the neighborhood! We also heard that two kiddos ran into each other at the mall and another's furnace was getting fixed and almost had a fire! Wow! In lieu of Word Study and Writer's Workshop, we completed our conference presentations and practiced sharing them. Something big and terrible happened in Because of Mr. Terupt and they about killed me when I stopped reading before finding out what happened! Let's just say that it does not look good...I wonder what this means for the class?? Then, in Reader's Workshop, we read, blogged, visited the library and continued working on our book genre sort. We are taking old book order magazines and cutting out the book covers and sorting them by genre. This will give us some recommendations too-by genre-for our 30 book challenge. We had a very sweaty gym, lunch and indoor recess. After quiet time, we got working on our math. Those that finished on Friday, are working on either making a quilt (and then expressing it's design in fractions) or finding and reporting the demographics of our school in fractions (boys/class, girls/class, 4th grade/school, etc.). Everyone else took the test today. Some started and will finish tomorrow after practicing some specific skills while others felt confident to complete the test today. By Wednesday, we'll be working with line plots and fractions on a line plot. Finally, we ended our day with our Chinese New Year celebration!