Valentine's Day Recap

Friday was a busy day! Our school celebrated Valentine's Day and participated in Jumprope for Heart, the fundraiser for the American Heart Association. Since it was Friday we also had a reading test and a spelling test. My students did so great, other than a few tummy aches!

In math, we finished our graphing unit with a test on Thursday, so on Friday we did M&M Graphing! The kids loved it. This freebie requires students to record their data in a tally chart, and then graph it in a bar graph and a pictograph. Then we ate M&Ms!

             

With my 4th graders it was a normal busy day of working on our writing (our state test is so soon!!!) and taking our Friday tests. At the end of the day we did get to enjoy our Valentine treats though. My students were so sweet to each other. Their Valentine bags were so full of treats they began falling off the board from where they were hanging, that I had to take them all down. One student made personalized wordles for everyone, another made rainbow loom bracelets for everyone. And as their teacher they spoiled me silly! My students make coming to work easy. One even made a Tagul for me since we learned all about them in writing. 

We have off tomorrow for President's Day and on Tuesday we have a field trip! Looking forward to another fun week with my students and our last week of prepping for our big writing test!

A Busy Monday

In writing, we've been working on holding peer conferences and then editing our essays. I've been paring up students randomly. Then they trade papers and read each other's essays. On post-its they have to write two compliments and two suggestions for improvement. After sharing their ideas with their partner they edit their own writing. Sometimes we do it again with different partners and only one compliment and one improvement. Then they finally turn them in to me and I check over and conference with students as well. It's taken a lot of practice, but now our peer conferences are running like a well-oiled machine! (See my post on figurative language below! Haha!) The conversations I'm overhearing are wonderful and I think they're really learning from each other. (Here's hoping!)

In science, we've been learning about measuring mass and volume. Students experimented using a balance to find the mass of a whole object. Then they broke the object apart and found the mass of the pieces. After finding the sum of the masses they compared it the mass of the whole and found that they were equal. Many had predicted that it would change, so it was good to find out the answer firsthand. Students also measured volume by measuring how much water was displaced in a graduated cylinder filled with 30 mL of water after adding an object.  

After lunch I walk down to the Kindergarten building and pull my first grade math students from their K/1 combo class. Lately, we've been working on reading and interpreting data from graphs. All my students agree their favorite kind is picture graphs... just because they like drawing smiley faces or "stars" for each vote. I was surprised by how quickly they caught on to tally charts and the group of 5. Today we looked at bar graphs though using the bar graph center from my TpT store. I didn't have time to print and laminate the graph cards, so I just printed the response sheet and we looked at the graphs on my laptop screen. I think my class liked it more this way and I saved on color ink! 

    

In reading, we finished our novel study on Stuart Little today. I don't think I'll be reading it with my class again next year... I wasn't in love with it. My students enjoyed it, but it didn't lead to the deep discussions I was hoping for. We're starting Island of the Blue Dolphins this week and I'm excited about this one! What novel studies have you tried?