We celebrated Christmas.  Our Elf on the Shelf brought in a humungous red Santa bag full of gifts for our classroom.  We spent time wrapping our family gifts and then we had some treats and got to open our gifts.  They were so cool we couldn't wait to show them off.  It started snowing in the morning and Ms. McGinley let us go outside so we could be the first ones to put our footprints in the snow on the playground and we got to show off our new hats.  It was a really fun day and we were excited for Christmas break.

 

 

Thanksgiving was a full day of laughter and learning.  We spent a week learning a lot about social studies events and then we spent a day celebrating our own first Thanksgiving.  We wrote stories on animal hide (Ms. McGinley crumpled up brown paper bags and tore them in funny shapes), we made headdresses and decorated feathers. 

We made salt dough beads and painted them.  We could have traded them like the Indians did but no one wanted to give up their beads.

We made cornbread muffins to go with our stew.

 

We made butter to go with our muffins by shaking cream.

and we even made fertilizer with oreos, gold fish crackers, and jelly beans just like Squanto - only ours tasted much better.

 

 

 

We have also celebrated a few holidays together.  For Halloween we decided to leave the sweets at home and bring our scientific brains to school for some really spooky experiments.  We made witches skin, ghost boogers, and goblin guts.  Then we had some healthy snacks of cheese and crackers.  It was an amazing day and we learned a lot about liquids, solids, and tools to measure with.  Ms. McGinley is always sneaking learning in on us.

We recently read several books about music.  We are working on common core standards and need to read 65% nonfiction books.  We have new books in our classroom and we are really learning a lot about things in the world around us. 

We decided to make musical instruments as a wrap up of our musical reading exploration.  We made a really cool music video to thank our donors for the books.  We truly felt like rock stars.  Please watch us while you can.  We are so good that we may be famous singers by tomorrow morning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK7kjzk8MBQ

We are working really hard in our classroom to increase our reading and math fact fluency.  We are using our I-pads to help us and lots of practice.  Ms. McGinley wrote a grant for new nonfiction books so we have a lot of new books in our classroom.  We love reading nonfiction and taking our a.r. tests; especially when we get a 100% because then we get a bead for our necklace.

 

 

Ms. McGinley wrote some grants and got I-pods for the room and then the district gave our classroom a few more so everyone could have one.  We worked really hard to learn how to use them as learning tools and we did such a good job that they got everyone in our classroom an I-pad to use.  We use them for everything.  We do our reading on them, take reading tests, we do our math and take math tests on them, we do our writing on them for reports and journaling, and we can even take our spelling tests on them.  We use them to practice our skills also.  What we really like to do is make videos for our vocabulary words or book reports and email them to our parents.  Sometimes we take a picture of our math worksheet and then use our finger to write the answers and then we e-mail it to Ms. McGinley.

We were fortunate enough to have four large concrete spaces by the garden area where benches used to be.  Ms. McGinley wanted our garden to be a literacy garden so she painted something different onto every space so that we could take our learning outdoors on really nice days.  This hundreds chart is a lot of fun to use with bean bags and whiteboards.  We throw two beanbags and make and addition, subtraction, or multiplication problem or we act lazy and just walk the numbers and count to 100.  Sometimes we jump across numbers so that we can skip count.  It is easy until you get to your fours and then it gets tricky.

This is the Candyland spot before the pictures were added.  Ms. McGinley has created cards to go with the area.  We have cause/affect, main idea, follow directions, and context clues.  It is a super fun way to do reading on a really nice day; especially when Ms. McGinley remembers to bring her delicious chocolate chip cookies.

This is our free choice area.  We use it to play scrabble with our spelling words and sight words.  Sometimes we get to play checkers on it at recess.  Ms. McGinley said it could be used for chess also, but since she doesn't know how to play...  she can't show us. 

As a classroom art project, we made stepping stones for all the story elements.  We have one for story retell, beginning, middle, end, characters, problem, solution, and favorite part.  The stones are done in mosaic art.  We used marbles, cut glass, buttons, cool glass treasures that looked like turtle, hearts, stars, ladybugs and other cool things.  We partner read books under the tree and then we walk down the path of stepping stones and retell the story. 

If your ever by our school you should stop and wander through our outdoor literacy garden.  You will love every minute of it.