Busy Minion News - Week of August 29th

This Week  It was a busy, fun start to the new school year!  We were busy learning all sorts of new classroom routines and procedures.  We read the story “Wanda’s First Day” and used that story to help us start learning about Work Plan activities and Spelling activities.  We created our Lucky Listener Club notebooks and created our own classroom Twitter feed (on the white board, not on the real Twitter) so we can tweet about the main idea of the story each week.  We started pretesting in Math and we are already working on a Social Studies project on the official NH Symbols.  We have dove into the first Harry Potter book and are enjoying listening to that a little bit each day after recess.  We have also started personal Tree Ring projects.

Next Week  After the long weekend, we will start a good 4 day week.  We will start with our first Literacy story “My Diary from Here to There.”  We will continue to learn about the Work Plan activities and begin our first Spelling list.  We will also begin Unit 1 in Math which is all about whole numbers, place value, and rounding in computation.  We will work on completing our designs of new NH license plates using the official state symbols and then we will start learning about the regions of NH.  We will also work on completing our Tree Ring projects.  

**This is just a copy from our Thursday Reflections for this week.  I will paste the news here to the website in case you need to refer to it.

Our First Picturing Writing Venture

Today we started our Tree Ring Picturing Writing project.  After checking out the real tree rings, and then looking at pictures of interesting tree rings on Pinterest, the students were asked to create a tree ring that represented themselves.  We used the crayon resist technique to create these paintings. Next week, we will work on writing about the special events that have happened in the years of our lives.  Please start brainstorming all the cool things/events that have happened in your amazing lives!

Checking out Tree Rings

We took the time today to examine the tree ring slices that Gramp Fuller brought in for us.  We reported our observations on our "Stick to It!" board.  We came to the conclusion that a ring grows on a tree one for every year of its age!  The rings tell the age of the tree!  The youngest tree we looked at was 33 years old.  The oldest tree we looked at was 76 years old.

Predictions?

An upcoming project has something to do with this:

What do you think it will be?

www.tagxedo.com

Today we discovered the website www.tagxedo.com .  It is a great website to create word clouds.  Word clouds can be a fun way to practice spelling words, make topic lists, and create things for all sorts of different projects.  Feel free to check it out. 

Circle Art

Our 'almost finished' Circle Art.  We worked on this art work together - each designing a quarter circle. One piece was missing when it got glued together.  Where is that last piece hiding?

First Day! Minions Rule!

Our first day was awesome!  It was our best day of school we've ever had!  Some memories from today: lots of duct tape, minions, fire drill practice, reading Harry Potter, discovering the classroom!   Finding out about Pudgie, Dobby, owls, and new friends!   - Signed the Minion Kids!

One Thing to Bring!

One thing that I need everyone to bring to school on the first day is a one-subject wire-bound notebook.  These will be our Lucky Listener Club notebooks.  We will organize them for fluency practice every week.

Welcome to Room 109 3/4's new website!

Thank you for visiting our new class website!  This is the place to find important class information and any exciting news that we have to share!  Be sure to bookmark Room 109 3/4!  The site is also formatted so it can be available on mobile devices - so be sure add to your Home Screens as well!