Day 141- I can hardly stand it!

Just one more day of school until Spring Break! I tried telling my students that there was no school tomorrow, but no one believed me.

Today grades 3-5 were treated to a Science Fair hosted by Parkridge Medical Center. Ms. Williams from Williams' Winners made sure to get pictures so she could update her blog. Check out her SCIENCE FAIR post!

Since our related arts teachers were needed to help with the Fair, we had extra time this morning. We decided to get into the healthy spirit of the day by completing our health fair activities from yesterday. I passed out paper plates, magazines and newspapers and my students were given these directions: create healthy plates!

Of course they had a great time. I heard things like, "Don't use that! That's a whoa food!" Thanks, Mrs. Custer and Mrs. Blowe!

During writing we worked on summarizing a story.

I have a confession to make... teaching writing is not my favorite. I'm a good writer, but teaching it gives me anxiety. I fully depend on the writing gurus Ms. Leahy and Mrs. Brock. I had Ms. Leahy walk me through a writing lesson and I started feeling more confident in my teaching. We'll see how long that lasts. :)

I made sure we worked on a story that we were familiar with. We've done a previous post on comparing and contrasting The Three Little Pigs and the True Story of the Three Little Pigs.So, today we reread the 3 pigs' story and worked on writing a summary using the 5-Finger retell.

I told my students that we only had one sheet of chart paper to use, so we wouldn't tell every detail. We only needed the most important details.
Here is what we came up with!

Ms. Leahy shared that the key to good whole-group writing lesson is reading each sentence as it gets written, that way we can make sure the sentences flow together. Each student who added a sentence also got to choose the color the sentence was written in. That made for a colorful summary!

Here's a little video of us reading the final product. Um... it might be a little shaky. I was filming with one hand and pointing to the words with the other.

One of these days I will sneak into Leahy's class and get video of a writing lesson. I'll be totally ninja, she won't even know I was there!

Math was also taken from Ms. Leahy. Yesterday she had her students conduct their own surveys, create tally charts with their findings, then create a bar graph with their tally data. Awesome!
So, my students received a post-it and were told to choose two things to compare. Most students chose to survey favorite colors, some chose different video games. Girls surveyed the girls and boys surveyed the boys.

 blue or white

 cupcakes or cookies

 red or blue

 puppy or cat

 Chipmunks game or Phineas and Ferb game

Literacy center pictures:

 spelling texters

 adorable kindergarten student who got to spend the day with us :)

word wall

**Tomorrow is the last day before Spring Break! It is game day during our Fun Friday time- students who received a purple paper get to bring a hand-held game or board game to play in the afternoon.**

Here's a fun little video for the Three Little Pigs!