The Bond Brief
November 1, 2013
Halloween Fun!
Reminders for Next Week:
Monday: Bring Book Logs and Goal Time Projects. I am willing to teach crochet if kids bring yarn and crochet hooks! I told the kids they can bring their non-chocolate candies to donate to the soldiers. I will donate $ to the fundraising Ruthie Greaves is doing for her friend at Commerce that has leukemia. (You should have received an email from Mrs. Timlin last night about the fundraiser.)
Tuesday: We have no school due to elections. Be sure to get out and vote! Walled Lake Schools has a proposal on the ballot for Safety, Security, and Technology!
The Week in Review
Social Studies: We started our unit on Michigan Geography. Our focus is the 5 Themes of Geography. You can think of Mr. Lip when remembering the 5 Themes. M= Movement R=Region L=Location I=Interaction between Humans and the Environment P=Place.
Reading: We are nearing the end of the Global Read Aloud. Today we tried to Skype with the class from Flin Flon, Manitoba, but technology was not on our side. We will try again on Monday. Our instructional focus was on vocabulary in our own books. We worked with dictionaries to define words, found synonyms and antonyms, as well as illustrated the wonderful words in our books. We continue to also think about character development.
Writing: We received a great gift from my husband's coworker...our very own book binding machine! We christened it yesterday, as we bound our Halloween stories. I am taking them home this weekend to comment on. The students loved being able to bind their own books and were amazed by the machine! It was so cute...as the machine is pretty simple. In addition, today we had a GREAT Daily Page session. Our word count average has increased so much during the first of the year. Our first session we had an average of 60 words in 15 minutes and today we had 130 words in 15 minutes (actually closer to 14, as we had to go to recess.) WOW! We talked about why we improved and noted that we did our Daily page from 10:45-11:00, instead of 8:15-8:30. We are going to keep it at 10:45-11:00 and see if we continue to do well.
Word Study: We will return to our Words Their Way sorts next week. We will do Sort 7.
Technology: We had a Mystery Skype session on Wednesday morning with 100 third graders from Noblesville, Indiana. They asked us questions about our state, and then they had to guess where we were located. It was a fun way to connect to other classes via Skype! Then later on that morning in computer lab, the kids enjoyed www.geoguessr.com. It is a fun geography game that allows you to guess where you are using Google maps street view. The kids loved seeing different parts of the Earth. We also went on Spelling City and printed off sign language spelling lists to practice our words. With the iPads we looked at last year's anchor charts (charts we create as a class to document learning) and we wrote summaries of what you can learn by reading the chart. We used different programs like Write About This and Educreations to showcase our thoughts.