Big Cheese and Halloween!

Check out our latest Big Cheese, Mrs. Mamula!  She read Halloween stories to us today.

And check out our adorable Halloween costumes.

Big Cheese

Check out our latest Mystery Reader!  We love to have readers in the class, and students are so excited to see people they know walk through those doors.

Earth Buddies

The past few weeks in science have been all about Conservation and Recycling.  We began by building our schema about the two words by looking through books and inferring their meaning.  We learned a lot just by looking through books, a great illustration of how we can teach ourselves!

Then we jigsawed reading books about being Earth Buddies- that means that we split up into pairs and we each read one of the short informational books.  Then we rearranged our groups so that we could share out our learning with students who read different books, combining our knowledge to build up our schemas even more!

We are getting really good at making inferences while reading.  We know that you need your schema and evidence from the text to make an inference, and that good readers infer answers to questions that cannot be found in the text.  Our schema is what we already know about a topic, and we use our schema every time we begin to learn something new, and add to our schema while we learn.  A great book we read to talk about inferring is Seven Blind Mice. 

 Mrs. Parker-Jones came in today to show us how to use some new features on Pixie to prepare us to create our own Earth Buddy Presentations.  

We made our presentations in the production room, and shared them with other students in the school. Let's see if Miss Miller can get our presentation on our blog to share!

EB Fundraiser and Pumpkin Raffle

As you know, we have been working hard to raise money for EB, which affects a student in our classroom.   A child born with Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB) has a deficiency of one of several proteins that anchor the skin to the body. One such protein is C7—an important form of collagen. Without enough of these proteins, the skin tears and pulls away from body easily, causing serious wounds and recurrent blistering (www.childrenscancer.org/puck/research.html).   When we heard that there was already a runner in the Columbus Marathon raising money for this cause, we knew we wanted to get involved! 

Our class prepares for our fundraiser!

I am so proud of how hard our class worked to set up this bake sale and pumpkin raffle, start to finish!  We not only came up with the idea, but wrote letters to other classrooms, made announcements to the whole school, donated our baked goods, and even worked at the Bake Sale and Raffle Ticket stand.  The first day alone, our pumpkins drew in over 150 raffle tickets, and we sold as many baked goods!

HTE staff decorated pumpkins for our Pumpkin Raffle

I want to thank our generous families who donated baked goods, our wonderful volunteers who worked at the booths, and our HTE staff who decorated pumpkins for our raffle (and they looked amazing!).  I also want to thank my caring and supportive group of students this year, to whom I credit the success of our fundraiser.

Students from Room 105 worked the Raffle and Bake Sale tables both days!

I am proud to announce that we raised $880.00 for EB.  The proceeds (through PUCK) go to support EB research at being done at the University of Minnesota. The research includes understanding animal models to find what the stem cell population is that makes skin and to figure out how to isolate it from human marrow. Also to do the clinical trials and to rebuild the immune system in children with EB and make blood and skin forming stem cells that are normal from EB patients.  Find out more at www.childrenscancer.org/puck/research.html.

Again, thank you all for your generous support!

Mystery Readers

Check out our most recent Mystery Readers, Mrs. Heather Berger and Mr. Dan Willis.  We love having our families and friends in to read to us!

Mrs. Berger read us a pumpkin story!

Lcpl. Willis shared Miss Miller's favorite book, Ferdinand, with the class.

Exemplars

Each week, we become mathematicians-in-training and explore expert problem solving strategies through our Exemplars.  Exemplars are really tricky math problems, which require math reasoning and thinking, as well as collaboration, to solve.

Each week, we introduce a problem and highlight one of the math strategies that successful mathematicians use to complete difficult tasks.  By the end of the year, we should be adept at using all of these strategies.  The problem solving strategies which we are learning to use, called the Math Practices in our Common Core Math Standards, are:
1. Make sense of the problem, then persevere
2. Use math that makes sense
3. Prove and defend our answers
4. Show our thinking in different ways
5. Use math tools to solve
6.  Explain my thinking using math words
7.  Notice patterns to help solve
8. Use a strategy that you've used before

The practices in blue are ones we have learned and practiced in class so far this year.  The ultimate goal is for students to be comfortable facing challenging mathematical tasks, and have a toolkit of strategies they can fall back on.  They also should be comfortable taking risks in small group settings, sharing their ideas and not focusing only on the "right" answer.  Our focus is on the process, rather than the product.

Check out some great pictures of our class using math tools and patterns to help solve an exemplar called Betty's Blocks.

All About the Atmosphere

The past two weeks in room 105 has been full of learning about the atmosphere!  We have become true scientists, conducting investigations, experiments, and making observations about the world around us. We wanted to prove two things through our investigations:  That the atmosphere is made of air, and that there is water in the air.  Those are two very hard things to prove, because air cannot be seen, and water vapor is also invisible.

We conducted experiments with water bottles, balloons, straws, and even a humidifier to try to prove to ourselves that air is in the atmosphere, and water is in the air.

Below are some pictures from our last experiment involving evaporation:  We made a puddle on the ground, and watched as the water disappeared in front of our eyes!  We remembered the word evaporation, and used it to explain what was happening in our experiment.

We traced our puddles in chalk to help us better see if any changes occurred to it over time.

What do you think we noticed about our puddles?

Next week, we will apply our understanding of the atmosphere and how water changes states when we learn about the water cycle.  Having this background knowledge form our experiments will really enhance our understanding of the atmosphere.  All of this learning fits into our unit on weather!

Author Visit: Sally Derby

We had a special visitor this week to room 105: Sally Derby, Miss Miller's grandmother, an author of children's books!  Mrs. Derby spoke to us about how authors think of ideas, write stories, and get their stories published.  It was a treat to have Mrs. Derby in, and we are hoping she can come back and work with us later in the year too!

Sally Derby taught us all about how writers think, work, and plan.

Our students help Mrs. Derby demonstrate the publishing process.

We were so thrilled to have Mrs. Derby here, and she shared with us one of her books that has not even been published yet! Talk about a sneak peek!

For more information about Mrs. Derby and her books, take a look at her website:  http://sallyderby.com/