Daily Archives: December 11, 2016

#classroombookaday UPDATE: Week 16 (yep, we’ve missed a few)

Whew!  I’m pretty sure I blinked and November was over, and I also took a look and now we’re on WEEK 16 of our book-a-day (or a little more!) challenge.  I think I shared that we’ve now moved to the inside of our door, but if not, here’s a pic so you’ll see what we’re up to now.  Sorry to have missed the last 3 weeks! Thanksgiving break always throws a little bit of a wrench in the works. 🙂

So…here’s where we are as of last Friday, December 9:

We’re up to 266 books!! I am still wondering if my prediction of 500 will happen, but for sure we’ll get close to filling up this side of our door before Spring Break!

Patterns in the Sky

I just went back to link back to some work we did with shadows and realized I NEVER WROTE ABOUT IT!  What??  Well goodness gracious, Mrs. Bearden, it’s about time!

We spent much of this last quarter working on learning about Patterns in the Sky–discovering new things about the sun, moon, stars and planets.  During our study we read lots of books on the topic (many whole group, but also lots that kiddos read individually or with a partner);

had lots of conversations and discussions about what we noticed happening each day (with the sun) and at night (when we saw the moon at home); created videos and art pieces; went outside to explore how the apparent movement of the sun affects our shadows;

had the KSD planetarium visit us along with Mr. Bartin, and then we created a class poster to both help show our learning, as well as remind us of what we had discovered.  Students worked with their partner to create an image to represent the big ideas we’d worked on during our unit.  Turned out pretty great, and kiddos did super work!

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Close-ups of each one are here (plus what they represent):

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What do you know about patterns in the sky that you could teach us about?  What do you wonder?