November 19

I love Alexis being my Top Banana, she does keep me on schedule and wants to make her own too.  I have to love children's enthusiasm to being the teacher.  We learned a lot form Alexis she shared her poster today and reported she added a picture of her brother and her searching through drawers in the kitchen.  When asked why she told us,"You would have to ask my mother I was too little."  We asked why she liked to play with her brother Alex she replied,"My big brother is always too busy."  I love to report exactly what they say because children do have a vivid explanation for things going on in their life.  She shared she added herself as a baby so we could she her when she was small.  I loved learning about her today, can't wait for more.

We had a great day continuing withe research and learning the key to research is reading and narrowing our topic to fit what we know something about already and have more questions.  We completed our CGI math with subtracting and addition.  Please make sure your child is not just writing a number sentence.  They need to show how they solve for the answer.  I have taught them base ten method or partial sum method.  Please have them show you the strategy to fit them.  If they are to solve 52-38 they would think of it as what number do I add to 38 to get me to 52. 38 is 2 steps to 40, 40 is ten steps to 50, and 50 is 2 more steps to 52.  This would be 2+10+2= 14 the answer is 52-38=14.  They have been doing this in class and should be able to model this for you.  I hope you are having a fantastic time letting them teach you.

Tomorrow we should have enough time to hear from Aiden and Kelly, who need to do their show-n-tell. They forgot on their week.

November 18

We had to sadly say good bye to Aiden as Top Banana and hello to Alexis.  I have to report we did not get to share out with Alexis due to clean up taking longer than it should.  We did get to see her become our new line leader and oh boy she lead well.  

We had a great day filled with lots of learning.  We are starting our research unit during reading and writing.  Their focus is how do we begin research?  We discussed reading and gathering background knowledge and just exploring books is the best way to begin.  Then we continued to write more imagined compositions and looked at our problems and solutions in our writing.  Then we finished up are subtracting and addition with double digits.  We are continuing to discuss our government lesson in Social Studies.

November 12

PTA meeting tonight and we had another great day publishing our books and getting CAFE time, stations.  We also did our new CGI problem.  I will update later need to run to eat before meeting.

November 11

We had a fabulous start to our day with our Veteran's Day Celebration.  I love this assembly every year and cry big time due to my husband being in the Army.  I am proud and honored of our students for their wonderful performance.

We heard from both our old Top Banana and our new one.  Alianah did her show-n-tell from Friday and we learned a lot from her.  We know she loves jewelry, and the keys on her necklace we interesting.  The necklace raised a lot of questions because the keys were on the kids minds.  They wanted to know what she use d them for and she replied,"I try to use them to open the doors my brother locks."  We all thought that was a great reason.  Then she showed her stuffed lion she bought at Wal-Mart, "Just because."  We hated to say good bye to her but Aiden needs a turn.

Adien shared he loves Pokemon Cards.  He reported he did not want to place the good ones on there.  "I was scared they might not still be on there at the end of the week."  I know he can trust me and I am sure the others, but I understand the special ones I would not want to bring either.

We had a great day publishing our book and doing Veterans day activities.

November 7

We learned a lot about Alianah she has two brothers one is 9 and the other is 4.  She loves soccer and plays with her brothers.  she does not play on a soccer team but stated, "I might one day."  She loves to draw and I see that evidence in my class when we do any kind of art work.  She enjoys reading and I felt like dancing because I love hearing this come out of children.  We can't wait to hear more about her tomorrow.

November 5

We are excited to hear form Alianah this week, however, I have been busy teaching we have been running out of time.  We asked her to share something about herself and she reported I like to ride my bike.  The funny thing is I thought she said, "I like to ride my elephant."  I was laughing hard and the students of coarse were laughing just as much.  I used my inference skill to realize this could not be true, but still I had to ask her if she had an elephant?  I can not wait to learn more from our new Top Banana.

Today we had a great time learning how to read nonfiction. We discovered that a nonfiction book gives us facts, but can also be written in a story format.  We compared fiction and nonfiction books and noticed how the types of texts are different. We discussed how we need to use the features to help us read and locate information.  We continued writing imagined fiction stories and are looking forward to be able to start publishing our class book.  We moved in to Math and had a difficult time writing our explanation in our CGI math notebook.  We spent quite a bit of time on this.  Please make sure they are not just giving an answer that they are explaining how they solve the problem.  Foe example if they are to add 45 and 22.  They do not just write the answer is 67.  They should be writing I drew base ten blocks.  I counted the tens and I got 60.  Then I counted the ones and I got the final answer 67.  Thank you for your support on their math homework.  As a class we need to work on about following directions everywhere in the building?  We had a hard time following the teachers directions in the library.

November 4

I will post more when I get home.  Please check back, okay.  I wanted to report that we had a lovely time listening to my husband talk to the class.  He came in to meet your children and to report about being a veteran, due to the upcoming Holiday.  We loved listening to him explain all about his work.

Today we said good-bye to Anthony and hello to Alianah as our Top Banana.  We learned a lot from Anthony who shared his favorite book the notebook of doom.  Then we learned he had to pass up an iPad to buy Stitch from Disneyworld.  "He was just to cute not to buy him," Anthony told us.  We thought so too when we saw him.  We also loved his Chinese checkers game, boy did this raise a lot of questions.

We had a great day continuing reading nonfiction and writing imagined stories.  We are working on money and number concepts with two digit numbers.