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.