This Week At School

- first off it was only a 3 day week for my students... Monday was a holiday here and Tuesday was meetings for teachers and meet the teacher in the evening when students dropped off their supplies.

-  We did our first entry in our math journals!  I bought an interactive math journal document from TPT that is fantastic (plus I got it on sale which makes it even more fantastic).  It took us ALL morning but we did it (this also included decorating our books, setting up a table of contents, and picking out a ribbon that will be used as our bookmark. We still have to make some success criteria but I thought we would do that after we did a few entries together so that they know what I expect.  Naturally I forgot to snap a picture of my page of my math journal but I'll hopefully remember to do that tomorrow and I'll update this.

- We made these name spheres for our lockers as an art project.  We ended up cutting them out into circles so that they would fit on their lockers and then I laminated them so they would last (I'll take a better picture of mine tomorrow as well).

- I plan to save all their art projects this year and we will make a book out of them at the end of the year.  To go with every art piece we will do some poetry.  So we were doing a really simple poem about us for this piece of art.  Remember our writing folders?  Well we used them to go through the writing process for the poems.

-  I gave them homework for the weekend... I gave them each a piece of paper with a heart on it and they are to fill it with pictures and words of things that they like.  We are going to put that heart in the prewriting section of their writing folders so that they will have a whole heart full of things that they like... hopefully that will translate into things they like to write about as well.

-  We did "Where Did the Water Go?" in science class to learn about the scientific process.  I couldn't find sodium polyacrylate anywhere so I went the diaper route and took the powder stuff out of it. I tested it once at home and assumed it work in the classroom.  To be honest I was REALLY scared I was going to pour water all over someone's head (it was a super sweet girl too that guessed the cup with all the water) but it worked!... I must admit I added A LOT of the powder to ensure it would though.  One student had seen the experiment before but no one really listened to her and the thing went over like gangbusters!

Afterwards they wanted to see what would happen to the "water" if we left it overnight in the cup... so it turned into a further science lesson the next day.

-  I photocopied pages for my students from an "I'm Through, What Can I Do?" book and we put them into duotangs.  So far they are working great!

-  We got everyone into the computer lab to change their passwords.  HOPEFULLY they all changed their passwords to what they told me they would.

-  In my school we do opening religious exercises in the morning that I help to lead.  We started those up on Friday and I'm doing devotions from the Adventures in Odyssey Series that my 4-6's seem to be into.

-  I have an interpreter in my room for the first time ever!  She is pretty fantastic... I hope all my jokes are being translated well!

-  Everyone was excited to play "Ruleopoly" (one of my students even decided to make her password ruleopoly).  I was nice and let everyone roll this first week.  I told them that if I have to talk to them more than a couple of times in a short period of time I would tell them to turn their names over and they wouldn't get to roll the next week.  Boy does that work!  I also told them that anyone who wasn't signed out of their computers when the bell went was having their name turned over and everyone was in line within seconds.  I may have stumbled upon something really great here.

I got my Ruleopoly board from perhaps the more commonly known Homeworkopoly but I wanted to use it for more than just them getting their homework done (why have multiple behaviour things going on at once?) so I just changed the name!


Stay tuned for a post on our Ruleopoly

We did a group work project where they had to stack 6 cups using only an elastic band and 4 pieces of string (no hands could touch the cups).  I had to give them a hint that they needed to use everything and each of them had to have a part in stacking each individual cup.  They all eventually got it.

We are off to a swell start to the year in 5/6CP!