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!

Anchor Charts and Exit Slips - Great Low-tech Tools

While we love integrating technology into our lessons, sometimes we go low-tech. I introduced our division unit by using an anchor chart and exit slips. 

I created this anchor chart to share with my students as we began the unit. They can refer to it when they need the proper vocabulary word for their written math responses. They also like to use different strategies that are listed on the chart. Doing a search on Pinterest for anchor chart is a great way to find some inspiration. 

Want an easy way to assess what your students got from your lesson? Try using exit slips. Hand the student an index card or half sheet of paper and have them respond to a prompt like this:

• What are five things you  learned in class today?
• Write three things you learned, two things you found interesting, and one question you have.
• What do we need to discuss in the next class?

Or you might prefer using printed ones such as these:

• My Math Class Exit Ticket from Paula Naugle
• 3-2-1 Exit Slip from Paula Naugle
• Exit Slips from Adlit.org

• Exit Slips from ReadWriteThink
• Cute Elementary Exit Slips from Mandy

Either way using exit slips is a quick and easy classroom strategy.

When I recently used them with my students at the end of a math lesson I discovered that several were struggling with division equation that are written in algebraic form. Why is it that variables unnerve them? Well, I used the information from the exit slips to teach further lessons on division where each equation was written as an algebraic expression. Several also informed me that they still needed to learn the vocabulary associated with a division problem. We started the next class with a review of my division anchor chart.

My students were required to write a sentence about their learning or ask a question on the back of their exit slip. They handed them to me on their way to lunch.

Do you use anchor charts or exit slips? Please share links in the comment section.

Taylor Swift Webcast

Today we were so excited to watch the webcast with Taylor Swift speaking about reading. The live webcast which lasted about 30 minutes, was sponsored by Scholastic and hosted by national radio personality Trey Morgan. Taylor was interviewed about her favorite childhood books and she shared how reading influences her song writing. Several students from around the country were even able to ask Taylor a question during the webcast.

Here are some pictures of us watching the webcast.

I learned that both Taylor and I grew up on a Christmas tree farm. How cool it that? 

If you missed the live webcast, you can watched the recording here. 

Did Taylor inspire you to go RED - Read Every Day? 

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. **

Greetings to Our Quadblogging Buddies

Hello from New Orleans, Louisiana. I am Ms. Paula Naugle and I teach two groups of fourth graders (9 and 10 year olds) math, science, and social studies. I have 19 students in my morning block and 24 students in my afternoon block. This is the first time we have participated in quad blogging. I am writing this post because we missed a whole week of school due to Hurricane Isaac and are on vacation today because it is Labor Day.

Do you have hurricanes where you live? Let me tell you a little bit about this last week. Isaac started as a tropical depression off the coast of Africa two weeks ago and traveled across the Atlantic Ocean and into the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf forms the southern border of Louisiana. As he got closer to us, he became a tropical storm. The weather forecasters predicted he would become a category 1 hurricane and was headed directly for the mouth of the Mississippi River and New Orleans. We have a system of levees which were built to keep flood waters from the storm surge out of most of the city and surrounding suburbs. But there are many low lying areas which are not protected by the levee system. People in the low areas were told to evacuate because the flood waters could be as high as 15 feet.

Several of my students evacuated to Texas because they did not want to be here after the hurricane blew through because we would probably be without electricity for several days due to the high winds knocking down power lines. Isaac came onshore late Tuesday night and continued to have strong wind gusts and rain until late Wednesday.

I lost my electricity at my house at 1:11am on Wednesday morning. It is very scary to hear the wind gusting up to 100 miles per hour and not have any lights. Luckily my house was cool through Wednesday because the temperature outside didn't get too high. We were also lucky that Hurricane Isaac didn't dump too much rain on us, so it did not flood where I live. The worst damage at my house was part of my backyard fence was blown down.

My electricity was not restored until late in the afternoon on Saturday. Living in a house with no air conditioning when the temperatures outside get over 90 degrees is not a pleasant experience. Luckily we were able to plug our refrigerator into a generator one of my neighbors had, so we did not lose all of our food. Close to 600,000 people lost electricity during Hurricane Isaac. Homes in some of the unprotected areas got as much as twelve feet of water in them.

Slowly our area is returning to normal. School is due to reopen tomorrow and I hope all of my students have returned safe and sound. We'll write more about their experiences next time. By the way hurricane season is not over until November 1. I hope we don't get another one this year.

What is the longest amount of time you ever had to go without electricity? What is the worst kind of weather your area experiences?