The 2013-2014 School Year Begins

Friday, August 9, was our first day of school for this school year. It was exciting to meet the new members of my homeroom, most of whom I will teach math, science, and social studies. We spent the morning in homeroom organizing our classroom supplies, getting our cubbies labled and organized with our new books. The students also wrote a paper called Three Truths and a Lie, which they shared with the whole class, as we tried to figure out which of the four statements was untrue. They also created a "mini-me" which holds a notecard telling important facts about them.

During the afternoon, we fired up the netbooks and learned how to create a PowerPoint slideshow. Ms. Naugle demonstrated by using our Promethean board how to open PPT, create a title slide, add new slides, add imagines, and save the work. Then the students had a chance to create a three slide PPT about their passon. The students also learned how to create a folder on the computer's desktop so that they can save all of their creations to their personal folder. Everyone did an awesome job with our first tech assignments of the year.

Before heading to PE (our last period of the day), they had a chance to flex their math brains by completing fact games on www.multiplication.com.

I can't wait to meet the rest of my class who didn't come on Friday. Hopefully everyone will be present and accounted for on Monday. I have created fun and engaging lessons for us to do next week.

What a great start we had to our new school year! 

Earth Day 2013

Well as luck would have it our Spring Break (April 18 - April 22) fell right when I'm usually in full swing for Earth Day activities in our classroom. I've had to modify my usual Earth Day celebration and will extend it until the end of April, which is the end of Earth Month. We did not take part in the Earth Day Groceries Project because of when state testing and our Spring Break occurred and that makes me sad. I have loved being a part of this project for the past 5 years.


Instead my students are creating  Earth Day mini posters, writing acrostic poems on their blogs, and are completing my Environmental Heroes Web Quest. I created this web qquest as one of the artifacts for a graduate class in took in 2010. Since it is a mini research project, I think is aligns quite nicely to CCSS. 

Please feel free to share my web quest with your students. I will be posting pictures and inks to their other work for Earth Day when we return from Spring Break.

What are you doing to celebrate Earth Day? Please share by leaving a comment. 

Images from Free Clip Art  from Hubpages

Hello Round 4 Quadblogging Buddies

Welcome to our class blog. We are so excited to be part of this blogging quad. We are a fourth grade classroom just outside of New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, and in Ms. Naugle's class we learn math, science, and social studies. Let us give you a peek into some things we are doing in our classes.

We are learning how to write short research papers in science class. Each one of us had to select an animal we wanted to learn more about and research it online. We wrote notes in our notebook and put down where we got our information from for our bibliography. We have a set of netbooks in our classroom, so we each share a computer with another student. Soon we will share our individual blogs with you. That is where we are going to write our final reports.

One of the things we love doing is connecting with others by using video-conferencing tools like Skype or Google Hangouts. Last week we were visited by author Jeff Rivera via Skype. Jeff read his new children's book to us and we definitely are fans. His books are available as Kindle books from Amazon. Guess what the title of his book is? Um...Mommy I Think I Flushed My Brother Down the Toilet.

In math class, we are learning about fractions and decimals. We have learned how to show a fraction as an area model, a set, and on a number line. One of the sites we use to learn about this is LearnZillion. Ms. Naugle also put a Google document into Edmodo for us that has some other websites on fractions for us to check out. 

Well that gives you some information about us. We look forward to learning more about you and reading your comments. We'll be checking out your blogs in the coming weeks. Happy Blogging!