Thanksgiving Thankful Turkeys 2014

Tuesday, just two days before Thanksgiving, we had a wonderful afternoon reading through our “thankful slips” that we had written for each other.  This was an activity we started at the beginning of November.  We decorated our cups to look like turkeys, and each day throughout the month, we took a few minutes to choose two slips and write about why we were thankful for those two students.  By the end of the month, everyone in the class had a chance to think and write about why they were thankful for each of their classmates.  It was quite the uplifting afternoon once we finally had the chance to read them.  Lots of smiles and hugs were shared that afternoon.  Happy Thanksgiving to you all, and I pray we can remember all those things we were thankful for in each of our classmates as the year continues.

4R Fall Fun 2014

With my growing love of Instagram and Twitter, I have found myself blogging on our class blog less and less.  This must change!  You, our faithful followers, deserve more.  So even if you follow my other accounts, those are only part of the story…a 140 character glimpse into the goings-on in 4R.  Here is where you get the whole story.  So now, without further adieu, I will attempt to bring you up to speed on what we’ve been up to in our classroom over the last month.

Since the topic of the Great Flood and Noah’s Ark kept coming up in our Science and Social Studies discussions, we decided we needed to take some time to read the story of the flood and dig deeper into that story.  One afternoon we took to the soccer field and measured out the actual size of Noah’s ark.  I don’t need to tell you, it was huge!!

We also did some creative writing.  The students chose from a list of 10 different Noah’s Ark-related writing prompts, and wrote something to add to our board.  They were very entertaining.

This fall we also tried our hand at some iPad projects.  The students chose a favorite book, and did either a book review/summary or read the entire picture book.  The apps we used for this project were ChatterPix, Tellagami, and Educreations.  The first two are limited to only 30 second recordings, so they worked well for the reviews.  Educreations worked for both ideas, and made for some pretty neat longer-length videos.  Once they had created their video recording, I entered each review into a QR code, and we hung them from the front bulletin board.  This allowed for parents and other students to scan the codes and see what they had created!  Too fun.

At the end of October, we talked about the life of Martin Luther for quite awhile.  As part of this discussion, the students created Reformation word clouds on the iPads, and also wrote out Reformation tweets.  They had to write, in 140 characters or less, something that might have been posted in 1517 if Twitter had existed.  I took their tweets and posted them on my own Twitter account.  We received many favorites for these, but also had some great conversations with some commenters.  Our assistant principal commented on many of our tweets as if he was someone from that time period.  We had fun coming up with responses to his and other comments.

We also had a Reformation/Fall Party, complete with Luther seal temporary tattoos and “Diet of Worms” cake.  🙂

In the last few weeks, we’ve seen a lot of exploration in our Science labs.  To go along with our study of Technology and Design in chapter 2, we wrapped up the chapter with a boat design lab.  The object was to design a boat that would hold the most cargo.

Most recently in Science, we began our chapter about Motion.  What better way to introduce the idea of motion than with wind-up toys, rulers, and stopwatches?!

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about what we’ve been up to in 4R so far this fall.  More to come, but this post is full enough for tonight.  🙂