Quarter one wrap up!

I can't believe that the quarter is over. Did that fly by or what? Here are some things that we have been working on in our classroom.

We finished reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the kids conjured up their own tasty treats! Take a look at some of these adorable sweets...

I love how you "whip" this one to change the flavor, AND how you can find it at Kroger.

How Clever is this!? Hottest thing in town....

They did such a great job and had so much fun. The class voted on which candy they believed should go to "production". The Salty Sour Wip won after a tie breaker and a convincing speech from its maker. 

In math news...

We have been plugging away at bar models for a couple of weeks. Tomorrow is our last day on this unit and I couldn't be happier. Math in Focus is great and it goes very well with the Common Core Math Standards, but BOY is it hard on the kiddos. They have some trouble with modeling. Our main focus as a school is problem solving. So many of them want to skip the modeling and go straight to the equation to solve. I am constantly telling them to back up and model. It will help them tons later in their math careers they are familiar with modeling. 

ANYWAY- mental math strategies are in the core. I personally think they are tricky to teach. Decomposing numbers seems to be the strategy of choice for a lot of my students. It's awesome...

Check out this work one of my students was doing today during our math block. Perfect bar model and decomposed number at the bottom... (insert happy dance here).

It won't be long until they are doing all of that decomposing in their little heads! 

Candy on our Minds!

It's been a minute! Things really picked up at school and I have been super busy lately. I'm arriving at work at 7:00 and not leaving until 5:30-6:00 each night. WOOF! The one thing that keeps me going is that I can see my kids making such great strides. 

I spoke to a friend earlier in the year and she mentioned she was reading "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" to her class. I thought it would be a great read aloud. I was right... my kids beg for it as soon as they enter the room and moan when we have to stop. It's pretty long, but most of my kids had seen the movie and I figured that would help them a bit. PLUS it's great for comparison. They are always pointing out things that different from the movie version. 

We completed this little writing activity today. Each child shared their writing and picture with the class using the document camera. They got a kick out of that. Here are a few precious examples.

You can grab that activity by clicking on the picture above. Once again, all of the text won't appear until you download the document. Haven't quite figured that one out yet :-/.

Beginning Monday, students are going to be "inventing" their own candy. I created this graphic organizer to help them get a handle on all of their thoughts! I told them to spend the weekend brainstorming all of their delicious ideas. The end product will be a descriptive writing piece (we've been focusing on adjectives) and creating their candy out of construction paper and art supplies. 

Speaking of adjectives...AND candy, I created this PowerPoint with tons of candy pictures. We practiced using adjectives to describe the different candy on each slide. Click on the picture below to take a peak.

OK... last but not least. A Pinterest "aha" moment. So simple, but so amazing. Look at how neatly my anchor charts are now organized! I'm overly excited about it. I was always fumbling through them... Pinterest really is sent from above!

We're studying spiders next week... stay tuned!