Day 105- It's a success!

Over the weekend, I found out that ABCMouse.com is free for teachers and their students! I love ABCMouse and use it with my children at home, so I knew it would be a hit in my classroom.

What my students loved the best was that they each had their own lessons to follow, and their own avatars that looked like them. Well, they also loved that they got to 'play' on the website during literacy center time.

The site is individualized, so each student works at his/her own level and speed. Also, the site has loads of wonderful science and social studies information that would easily fit into any K- 2nd grade classroom.

To make things fair, each Team has its own day to 'play' on my laptop. Team 1 is Monday, so today was their day to play! Since the kids had to take turns, they worked on their regular literacy center until it was their turn on my laptop.

Pictures of centers today:

 

 Poetry/ Fluency with compound word review, Noun Town/ Word work

I am thrilled to announce that... math today was a breeze! We began a new unit and the topic was measurement. During our calendar time on the carpet we began by talking about how we put numbers in order from least to greatest in the last unit. If we can do it with numbers, we can do it with anything! For instance.... people!

I called 3 soldiers up and we practiced putting them in order from tallest to shortest, and vice-versa. After practicing a few more times, with my students explaining why they arranged their friends in certain orders, we got to our math workbook page. We totally breezed through the work. In fact, we even had 10 minutes at the end to play our Around-the-World with math facts game. I'm crossing my fingers that the rest of this unit will be as easy!

This might be a little out of place, but I promised my soldiers they would have their pictures with their 100 Things page from Friday. Well, 100 is a number, and math is where we talk about numbers! So, here are the pictures:

 Some of their items did fall off, but at least none of them, that I know of, were eaten!

In social studies, we are continuing our study of Famous African Americans. Last week we spent so much time on Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad that I neglected a very important figure in our nation's history... our first African American President.

President Obama seems like  laid-back guy, so I don't think he'd mind too much that I am getting to him a few days later than originally planned. First, we started with a KWL chart on what my students knew about Our President.

I opened up the topic to American Presidents in general, since I was curious about what they knew about the job itself, but they decided to stick with President Obama. From what I can tell, my students have a good over-all view of the Presidency and our current President.

One thing I felt the need to point out was that we do not simply call our President (or previous Presidents) by his first name. While I'm almost certain that President Obama would not mind that the students of my class feel close enough to him to use his first name, it's a respect issue.

Me- Can you really see yourself going up to our President, giving him a fist-bump and saying, 'Hey! What's up Barack?' No, I don't think so. 
Student- What about George Washington?
Me- What about him?
Student- What would you call him?
Me- Dead. But, if I saw his ghost, I'd still call him President Washington.

We read these two books after filling out the K and W parts of the chart.

 After reading the books, we found that most of our I Wonder questions were answered. I'm going to have to do some research about Presidential pets, since the books didn't cover that topic.

** One extra credit question that came up- What does the DC stand for in Washington DC? The student who comes back with the answer tomorrow gets $10 Cub Cash into their account!**

Our Daily Brain