Day 67- 'Twas the night before...

the night before, the night before.... Thanksgiving. There are two versions of this Thanksgiving tale. In one version, the turkeys are rescued and everyone eats pb&j sandwiches. In the other version, the family gathers for a traditional meal, complete with turkey. Both stories follow the rhyming pattern of the traditional Christmas story of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas.

 Children go on a field trip to a turkey farm and end up rescuing the turkeys.

A 'traditional' Thanksgiving with family.

My students loved the first book, and did a great job filling out the Venn Diagram that we made for both of the stories. 

We started a Thanksgiving art project today. The finished products will be given to Parkridge Hospital- one of our school's sponsors. I hope to get a picture of my students and their art tomorrow. 

Speaking of artistic things- I know you all are wondering about our Solar System Family Tree that we started last week! Well, we colored and cut out the planets and they were placed on the family tree.

 All the planets placed with care. 

Some star and comet embellishments.

The colors didn't show up well in the picture, so you'll have to come to the school and check it out for yourself! We put it in the hallway for all to see. I am proud to report that most of my students can name all of the planets, and some can even retell the story of Saturn and his idea of how to retain his position as king of the gods. (it's kind of a hard story to forget!)

For my small groups, I made this... (with the help of Mr. Russell who donated the cereal box, and Ms. Hill who colored the Old Lady)

I found the idea at Making Learning Fun, and it goes with our story from last week. (I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie)

This is a sight word game made from a cereal box. Students read the sight word and feed it to the Old Lady! Of course, we will create a little competition and see who can read the most words in 30 seconds and see who wins.

In TIER II today, we played a little game with the book that we had been reading. It's called Come in the Grass. (not a very thrilling story, I have to admit. Still working on sight words) Here is a little video of our activity!

Basically, I wrote each page on a sentence strip and cut the words out using crinkly-cut scissors. Students had to be the first to put their sentence back together and read it to me to get a ticket.

Impressive, right?

Our Daily Brain

** Reminder** No school Wednesday- Friday. 

Tomorrow is a special Cub Cash event! Students with good behavior, and $30 Cub Cash, can enjoy popcorn and a movie in the afternoon! Woo-hoo!

Day 66- One big 'happy' family

Maybe not so much 'happy' as dysfunctional.
I've mentioned before that I am a BIG fan of the Percy Jackson series. It's fun, easy to read, it manages to suck you in so much that you're willing to forgo sleep to finish the book. It also is a wonderful way to learn the basics of Greek (and now Roman) mythology.

In science, we have been learning about the planets and my students have had the best time! As we searched my favorite space website for kids, Kids Astronomy, we noticed that different 'gods' were being mentioned. So, we searched and found this website about Roman gods and goddesses. As it turns out, all of the planets in our solar system are named for a Roman 'god'- which have Greek counterparts.

After a quick side note to explain the different between God and gods (some of my students were confused), we started our Solar System Family Tree.

Of course, I had to map it out before I started the activity. We went through our astronomy website and filled in the Tree. Then we found the story about the planet on the gods and goddesses page. (I made sure to look through it the night before, and I'm glad I did! The page for Venus would have caused a riot!)

The best story was about Saturn (god of Time). I'm going to quickly relate it to you here. I didn't do any deep digging to find the story, some information came from Percy Jackson, and some from the History Channel and their recent show Clash of the Gods.

Once upon a time, Saturn, the god of Time, had 3 sons. Jupiter was the god of the Air, Neptune was the god of the Water, and Pluto was the god of Death. Since Air, Water, and Death are things that Time could not kill, Saturn decided to eat his children whole, so they would not be able to rise up against him and take his throne. However, their mother was able to trick Saturn, and instead of swallowing the baby Jupiter, he swallowed a large rock. Well, the babies grew up, even inside Saturn's stomach, and Jupiter decided to rescue his siblings. He tricked Saturn into drinking poison that caused Saturn to became sick and throw up the contents of his stomach- even his now grown children. The brothers, Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto, all free now, overthrew their father Saturn and are now the Big 3 of the gods.

Yes, that was the very abbreviated version, but my students were properly enthralled. I related the story to cries of "Eeeewww!", "That's gross!", and my favorite, "Mrs. Delk, I'm so glad that's fake!"

On a side note, Saturn's day of the week is Saturday. I find it fitting because Saturn is the god of Time, and Time is always something we wish we had more of on Saturday!

So, here is our filled-in Family Tree!

Next to each planet, we wrote the Greek name, and a picture or description of their ability. My students colored pictures of the planets, and they are going on the chart on Monday.

My students loved the stories so much, I'm tempted to add some mythology into our Fables lessons. There are some good life lessons to be learned from Greek and Roman mythology!

In math we kept working on shapes. Today's lesson revolved around slicing and dicing shapes to make other shapes. It was really more of a division lesson, only using shapes instead of numbers. Students had to understand that the divisions had to be the same size and shape.

Using my 'random child' bag, I called a student to the board, and she had to show the class how to turn a hexagon into 6 triangles, but she was only allowed to use 3 lines on the hexagon.

(I had to take the video, and follow her directions to me, so you'll see my hand in the video. I'm putting items on my ELMO, which is connected to my Promethean board- so things are enlarged.)

The one thing I don't like about my camera- no extra light. So, if it's dark where I'm filming, it's going to be a dark video. Sorry!

What the video didn't show, was her thought process before I started filming. I didn't film until she had already solved the problem and had explained it to the class once before. When she first got to the board, she was a little confused. Then she realized that the problem already called for 6 triangles, so she had me place the triangles where she wanted them, and found the 3 lines from there! Genius!

Our Daily Brain

p.s. Next week is a 2 day week! No school Wednesday- Friday!

Day 62- Longest Name EVER

We are still studying fables and folk tales and today's story comes to us from China. It seems that it was once tradition to name one's first born son a long and dignified name, while naming any other consequent children names of less distinction.
Such was the fate of one small boy with the LONGEST. NAME. EVER. His name was Tikki tikki tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi- pip peri pembo.

Not to give away the whole story (but feel free to ask your student about it!) the lesson learned is that a long name may be an honor, but it may come with a price.
On a side note, there was one time during the story that gave me some giggling fits. I don't think my students knew what to do when they saw their teacher acting like a 5 year old, so they just laughed along. :)

Math today was the Topic 7 test, and I am proud to report that 5 of my students made a 100%! We reviewed the skills first, and I had many good scores. Also, progress reports went home today, so hopefully you will see an improvement!

In science we did a KWL on the Solar System!  

 (yes, if you look closely, you will notice that I misspelled astronauts. Sorry.)

Space, the final frontier, these are the voyages of General Delk's Army. We looked at THIS awesome website. Kids Astronomy is a great website that is fun to look though. We learned that the Solar System is like one big family, if you look at it through Greek and Roman eyes. Fascinating!

This week, we are going to make a Solar System Family Tree. I'll admit, this is the first time I've really looked into astrological mythology. It really makes for a good soap opera!

No pictures of literacy centers today. During center time, we pretended we were on a safari through the room and students had to find words for each letter of the alphabet. Bonus points for putting the words in a sentence! The team with the most words found will win a prize! Now I just have to go through the papers and see what Team won!

Our Daily Brain

p.s. the wonderful Ms. Waddell and her students started their own blog today! You can check it out at www.thefabulous5s.blogspot.com