Motivation?

What motivates you? That was our morning question and while some answered their pets or video games, a few answered more thoughtfully with their parents, teachers, themselves or family. Just know that you are motivation for your child to succeed no matter if you realize it or not!

In academic block today, we began a new read aloud, The Beaded Moccasins by Lynda Durrant. It is based on the true story of Mary Campbell and has many, many Ohio connections. I use read aloud to model and springboard many teaching points. Today's lesson prompted quite a few discussions: language of the discipline with carding wool, fleece, lanolin, sheep dung :); details with the states surrounding Ohio and our Northern and Southern natural borders; setting of a story as the where and when; rules of what makes a novel historical fiction... students need to pick out an historical fiction book at their level (NO "I Survived" books as they are too easy) by Friday. We will be reading and working with these over the next few weeks for Any Book Book Club.
We got all the fourth graders together to review their topics for research. Students need to pick a Native American group from Ohio and create 3-5 questions to help guide their research. Next, they watched videos on ByrdseedTV to help them add depth and complexity to their research questions. Which group did your kiddo pick?

In math, my group is now a 4th and 5th grade multiage group! We have so many more 5th graders that their classes were huge so I took some leaders and created a 4/5 multiage group. Since we are all at the beginning of units, today, we completed one-pagers sharing any and everything they could possibly know about their topics. 4th grade worked with fractions and 5th grade worked with powers of 10 and decimals.

In meeting, I first showed the following picture and statement:

We discussed what this means and how this can help them. We even related it to advertising and how it's not necessarily false advertising but it isn't the whole picture. It was a great conversation that I hope many of them take to heart because they might not all be on social media now but they will be and need to value their worth!! Every Monday we share about our weekend and it gets really boring because some of them share every tiny detail..."I woke up and had breakfast and then watched YouTube..." So, I tried to make it a little more interesting today with them sharing an answer and we had to try and figure out the question. This was an epic fail!! They do not understand how to ask questions! This is something we will be doing again because it is a necessary skill in life! Sorry for all the exclamation points but it was so stressful. :( At the end of the day, we wrote our assignments down and then had some time to get caught up on work or continue our passion projects.

Thoughtful

Following up with my spiel from earlier in the week about giving everything your personal best, this morning, I posted this definition in our morning message. I pointed out the part about careful consideration especially. Many students have an auto-pilot response instead of truly thinking before they speak. 

It was a little chaotic and out-of-the-ordinary with all of the 5th grade kiddos going on their field trip today but we managed to make it work! :) We didn't have meeting but they had all returned in time to work on our building and creations in order to "dream up." 

In academic block, we first solved word ladders which allowed us to play with spelling and vocabulary. We even started creating our own and some students used foreign words, too! 

Then, we took a second look at the artifacts from yesterday and found out what they really are and how the historians discovered their purposes. We are busy preparing for our archaeologist visit next week!

In math, we continued working on our special number presentations and some kiddos even tried to solve some problems using order of operations as a challenge. 

Lunch with Lambright!

So, I opened my door to students during lunch time and today was another packed house! I enjoy chatting while eating and I feel that the kiddos feel more relaxed and can talk about other things than school. I even had students from other classes ask if they could come in and eat in the room today...the more the merrier! :)

In our academic block, we finished our read aloud, Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus. It was a really good book and we were able to see clearly how characters change over time through thoughts, words, actions and feelings. We then had time to continue our work on characterization of a character from a book we are reading independently. We also have a blog post to complete listing 20 things _____, inspired by Aven that made 3 different blog posts: 20 things that are cool about not having arms, 20 things that are not cool about not having arms and 20 supplies to survive middle school. (Unfortunately, we are having trouble with kidblog so they are to do this in Google Docs for now and we'll copy and paste it in when it's back.)

In math, we continued our work with our favorite number presentations. I'm very impressed that they listened to my spiel yesterday about pushing themselves and thinking outside of the box. One person is doing a lego stop motion video, someone is making a book, another couple are making iMovies... :)

In meeting, after writing our assignments down in our class planner and our personal "planners," we shared our favorite Disney characters followed by a game of "Who Am I?" where they had a Disney character taped to their back and could only ask each other yes or no questions to try and guess who they were. It was so much fun!! After lunch and recess today-complete with a snocone reward from the cookie dough fundraiser, we spent a little bit more time on our creations using legos, blocks, lincoln logs, dominoes, construction paper, cardboard... We also packed up a little early and headed out to watch Mrs. Tanner get a pie in the face!

The Big Dig!

Our students have loved to dig on the playground. However, they were bringing in rocks leaving giant holes (which can be very dangerous) and cleaning them in our sinks (leaving a big mess) so the teachers asked them to stop. This prompted the students to form a petition thinking it was unfair. So, as the problem solvers we are trying to be, we decided to have one day where they can dig and keep rocks WHILE beautifying the playground area! (We didn't buy nearly enough mulch though...) We also each brought back a rock that 'spoke to us' and after reading the book, Only One You, decorated the rocks to create our very own rock garden (a work in progress...).

In math today, we began a project where students pick a number that is special to them. They are also doing many different mathematical things with that number and creating a presentation. This work prompted a discussion about doing the minimum to meet requirements compared to doing their personal best and pushing themselves. Many worked quickly and got the first part finished, however, although it met the requirements of being done, it was very mundane and not at all challenging (adding 16 + 9 for instance).

In meeting, we shared who we sit with at lunch and why. First, however, we discussed listening to UNDERSTAND, not listening to RESPOND. I hadn't even finished the question when hands shot up which tells me they were listening to respond. We also talked about a fine line between sarcasm and being rude. Some are starting to cross that line when sharing because they are trying to be funny... We also seriously discussed goals for the week and what we are going to do to accomplish them.

Many students ate lunch with me in the room today. :) After recess and quiet time, we continued building with materials and will be "Dreaming Up" later in the week.