Week One - Mystery Location, QR Codes, Daily5 and Brain Breaks

On Friday, August 8, I got to meet my new 4th graders. It was the first day of our new school year and I was in for quite a surprise. We planned for only three sections of fourth grade becasue we didn't have enough students registered to warrant four sections. Well, by the end of the day each teacher had over 36 students in her homeroom. Yikes!

A request has been put in for another teacher, but it takes a while to be processed. In the meantime we jumped right in to our new year. Friday was moslty about getting supplies organized and labeled, doing some teambuilding, and getting to know our procedures.

When Monday rolled around we were ready to switch classes and start implementing the Daily 5 in ELA and the Daily 3 in math. I love that we are teaching our students to build stamina during the read to self block of Daily5. My students managed to get to thirteen minutes of stamina by Friday. We used this Word Work Choice Board with our weekly spelling unit for that section of Daily5.

During the Work on Writing part of the Daily5, my students started writing their first personal narrative of the year. Most chose to write about something they did this summer. No one has completed all of the 6 Traits steps to get their work to publication yet, but I hope by early next week they will. The students also enjoyed hearing the following read alouds during the Listen to Reading part of the Daily5 structure. I put the YouTube URLs through safeshare.tv to eliminate the "clutter" from the YouTube videos and then created QR codes using goo.gl.com URL shortner. Here is the document. 

One of the activities my students enjoyed doing was making posters about how to be a bucket filler after we listened to Have You Filled a Bucket Today? They did a great job working in a collaboartive group to create their posters. Here are a couple of examples. 

In math class we have worked on standard, word, and expanded form of numbers up to the millions. We also sharpened our addition and subtraction skills with larger numbers. Getting to play games was a big hit this week and even with all those students in our room. they kept the noise down to an acceptable level. We are using the classroom computers to complete a math placement test on MobyMax and will then be able to add computer time to our math daily rotations. 

This week in social studies we learned about the continents and oceans and practiced our mapping skills. One of the best ways I know to get kids to love learning about the geography of the United States is by playing Mystery Location via a video conference call using Skype or Google Hangout with another class. We were able to do just that with Mrs. Regruth's class located in Indiana. Over Skype using a series of yes/no questions they guessed our location first. My students had a blast and were thrilled when they figured out their location too.

We had a super first week, worked hard, learned new things, cooperated and collaborated nicely with our classmates. and even took quite a few brain breaks using one of our favorite sites - GoNoodle. So far our favorite GoNoodle brain break is Ice Cream and Guacamole.

Our First Mystery Location Call Using Google Hangout

Today we did our first Mystery Location call of the year. While most teachers use Skype for doing Mystery calls, we used Google Hangout instead. Mr. Krakower's class sent us a GHO invite and we accepted it and joined his hangout. We had several groups that we worked in as we participated in the Mystery Location call.

One group used our netbooks and were logged into a collaborative Edmodo group called Flattening the World, that we will be using this year with many other classes. This is known as "backchanneling". Gabby wrote a welcome message to Mr. K's class.

Another group were using the atlas in our social studies book to figure out what yes/no questions we should ask Mr. K.'s to help us discover where they are located. They also had a paper copy of a US map and were crossing off states as our questions were answered and some states were being eliminated.

A third group of students were the ones who sat in the "hot seat" in front of the webcam and asked the questions of Mr. K's class. They had to use the previous information and the work of the researchers to come up with the next question to ask.

In the end Mr. K.'s class guessed our location, right before we finally figured out their location. I love that my students cheered when the other class was successful.

As we ended the hangout, our students were commenting on how much fun this activity was. They really enjoyed the "learning" call and improved their geography skills, research skills, writing skills, and speaking and listening skills too.

Thank you Mr. Krakower. We enjoyed meeting you and your students today, and look forward to more collaboration with you during the year.

Have you done a Mystery Location call? Do you prefer using Skype or Google Hangouts? 

**Update - I edited this post after writing this one since I am now using the term Mystery Location call. **