Engaged learners in action!

The children have covered a large range of skills during these first weeks of our new year!

 We celebrated our star student, Sydney! Mrs. Groh stopped by the classroom to share an experiment and a story with our class.

 We LOVE having such a sweet, helpful, considerate, (and did I say sweet?!) girl in our class this year! Sydney makes every single day at school brighter just by being here!

 During math we have been enthusiastically tackling geometry skills! The children learned about points, line segments, parallel lines, lines of symmetry, and the characteristics of a polygon. We practiced drawing shapes that ARE polygons, and then we turned our paper over to draw shapes that are NOT polygons.

 More hands-on learning had the children reading National Geographic Explorer magazine during our nonfiction reading lessons. They were on a mission to identify nonfiction text features that help to strengthen our understanding including: photos, captions, headings, subheadings, labels, close-ups, maps, and glossaries.

 We created a scrapbook to cut, paste, and share the great examples we found!

 The children enjoyed reading a variety of books about great American leader and civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., as we approached his holiday on January 16th. We jotted important details of his life in a graphic organizer and planned our own biography of his life.

 More geometry! The children used Magneatos to build pyramids with their classmates. What a great way to see and better understand 3 dimensional shapes! We practiced counting the faces, edges, and bases of each shape. We also noticed that the name of the pyramid is determined by its shape! (Ex: triangular, rectangular, pentagonal, etc.)

 I snapped a few photos of the children moving through their morning work. The children enjoy working with a buddy to review their spelling words together!

Another option to practice us through spelling city.com. Here, the children get practice typing their words along with some fun options for review and practice.

Here are the children with their final Martin Luther King, Jr. writing projects. They turned out better than I could have expected. As a whole, the children used their best handwriting and they did a terrific job of referring to their graphic organizers to write a detailed biography of such an important American leader. Listening to the children talk and help each other to add details to their writing, it was very apparent to me that the children learned SO MUCH through all of our reading, writing, and discussions over the past two weeks!

 It was time to celebrate another star student... Quin! We were happy to have a visit from Mr. Lokun who dropped in for a visit. Together they read The Ninjabread Man which was a story we hadn't heard before! We loved hearing extra details about the awesome pictures that Quin brought in. It was also an amazing experience to have Quin and his family FaceTime our class from Washington DC from their family trip the following day! Quin has a way of adding so much interest and excitement to our classroom each day!

 Speaking of excitement, the children have been having a blast adding their learning and artistic talents to an interactive polar hallway display right outside our classroom! They have chosen topics related to the Polar Region that they find interesting, and then researched a few facts using Pebble Go to go along with their drawing. I have never seen students so eager to research and learn! They couldn't wait to discover new facts so they could add them to the hallway display- asking often throughout the day when they can have some time to go back to this project! I have been so happy to see such interest and engagement- and what a terrific excuse to get them to READ -focusing on their nonfiction reading skills while they were at it!