What have we been up to???

January flew by.... maybe because we had so many interrupted days due to weather!  We have our fingers crossed that the groundhog was wrong and maybe spring will come sooner than later!  Below are a few pictures from our classroom during the month of January.  Thanks so much for sharing your children with me!  Enjoy!!!

We kicked off our "A World in Motion" STEM challenge this week by examining seeds and how they move.  We are now enjoying creating paper helicopters and making observations on how they move!  We will be working on this challenge "Engineering Designed by Nature" for the next two weeks.

We have wrapped up Unit 5- Place Value in Whole Numbers and Decimals.  We spent time reviewing our first half of the multiplication facts.  We will start the second half soon.  Reviewing your basic facts (addition, subtraction, multiplication) through games and flashcards is a great way to practice math skills at home!

We are using the app Book Creator to publish a fictional story we wrote.

The district has added an additional elementary exploratory class for third and fifth grade.  Mrs. Klenke will come out once a week (Thursday afternoons) to teach us more about technology projects.  The fifth graders are also joining us for these lessons.  Mrs. Klenke has begun by challenging the students to create movie trailers on a "good fit" book of their choice.

Students have been presenting their Keynote research projects about famous United States landforms as part of our Unit 3 literacy inquiry project.

We wrote about our behavior and academic goals for the second half of the 2014 school year and published them on our Kidblog accounts.

We painted our elevation maps as part of our literacy/social studies unit on landforms.

 

We learned how to use "Text Speak" and Siri on the iPads to help us with our writing.  It is great to be able to listen to what we have typed to hear our mistakes to correct.