Daily Archives: April 15, 2015

Walker’s Club UPDATE–Using 10s to Add Laps

I’m sure you know about our Walker’s Club competition that is happening at Robinson for April.  Well, I’m SUPER excited to say that two weeks strong our class is in the LEAD!!!  We have done both amazing walking AND amazing adding as we figured out our totals.

This week (well really the week ends tomorrow), we used a strategy that I stole learned from my neighbor Ms. Turken to add our laps.  Instead of using the strings to make combinations of 10 (like we had many times previously), we each wrote our lap total on an index card and used these cards to create combos.  It was a great way to be able to manipulate the numbers in an easier way, and actually SEE the 10s–they made piles, after all.

Thomas and C.J. worked hard this morning to add up our mid-week total for Week 3 of the competition.  Their work looked like this (they did the card work, and I put it on the chart):

Way to go Rm. 202 kids–for walking and adding in an amazing way!! 🙂

Pictures of the Day–April 15, 2015

I am creating a hashtag now for this feature, so share it if you like as an easy way for people (including you!) to peek into what’s going on in Rm. 202.  I think I’ll use #RM202POD1415.  Ok, maybe it’s a little long….got any ideas?  Please feel free to share!

Ok, so here’s the cuteness from first grade on this BEAUTIFUL St. Louis Wednesday:

It’s a little heard to tell from this picture, but there are MORE LOST TEETH from Rm. 202 mouths!! The best part of this picture is that Amelia and Charlie lost the SAME tooth last night! Picture-of-the-day-worthy for sure!

After we got done with interactive writing today, Emily said, “WOW–look at all of the words I wrote today!!” OF COURSE I had to take a picture! Way to go, Em!

Remember how Cardinal Day and Hat Day were on Monday? Well in order to do Hat Day, I had to abstain from wearing Cardinal gear (it just didn’t match…). So when I saw Ms. Lewis also wearing her navy Cardinal shirt, we had to pose for a pic. Say cheese!

Nate came over to me at Choice Time and said, “I made a B from the Jenga blocks. Wanna see it?” First of all, I was thinking he meant a BEE not a B, so I was impressed anyway, but then he showed me the detail that he added of the green parts (“I made them from paper and colored them green!”) it was even better. I wonder if he made it that way on purpose because it’s my favorite color….:)

And the Winner Is…

When we came back from Spring Break, we were in the middle of our opinion letter writing unit (I know, I still have not finished the story, but here’s the beginning again if you missed it!).  One of our first writing assignments was an opportunity to both tell me about their Spring Break AND test out their newly learned skills.  Double win, right? 🙂

Here are the directions I gave them:

Kiddos then spent several days planning and writing a letter that showed me their mad letter writing and convincing skills, and that included the most fun parts of their time away.  Unfortunately it took me a little while to get around to choosing a winner, but yesterday we finally sat down to crown the winner.  And the winner is….

It was SUPER hard to decide on the winner (there were two that it came down to and they were SO close!), but in the end, Millie’s letter had all the things we had be learning about: greeting, a stated opinion, 3 or more reasons, transitional words (like one reason is, another reason is, finally, closing, correct spelling and punctuation).  When I read it out loud, it was great to see (and hear) the reaction of the class–they could tell just by listening that it had all those parts.

And since it was a writing challenge, the prize was something to help make her writing even more spectacular–mini gel pens!

IMG_4412  I don’t use competition all the time, but sometimes it works to raise the level of excitement, engagement or even production.  And in this case it just made sense.  Way to go Millie, and other friends of Rm. 202 who wrote some great Spring Break letters!