On the 3rd, 4th, and 5th day before Christmas break my teacher gave to me...

On the 3rd day before Christmas break my teacher gave to me a bag of fluffy elf pillows.  (Yummy too!)

One the 4th day before Christmas break my teacher gave to me a herd of animal crackers.  (She also forgot to take our pictures!) 

On the 5th day before Christmas break my teacher gave to me a bookmark for when I read.  She also let us each pick out a book from Scholastic that will be here when we get back from break. 

We are so excited about our bookmarks for our NEW books!

Our Christmas party was a blast!  Thank you Erika Gassman, Karen Munson, Stephanie Sommerio, and Stephanie Burfield for all your help with planning, games, and food. We all had such a great time. Also, thank you to the parents that took the time to come celebrate and enjoy the party with us!  We love when you come to visit.

Games

We had to shake the bells out of the box that was tied to our waist.

"Check out my victory pose after I got all the bells out of my box!"

We also play musical chairs...well musical alternative seating chairs. ;)

Food

We had hot chocolate with ALL the fixings.  We also had some YUMMY chocolate chip pancakes.

On the second day before Christmas break my teacher gave to me...

On the second day before Christmas break my teacher gave to me, a bag of reindeer noses. Students were excited to get a bag of yummy reindeer noses to eat this morning!

On the first day before Christmas Break my teacher gave to me...

Each day the kids will get something from me to help us count down our week to Christmas Break.  Today the kids got a week of NO homework. When I say no homework, I mean no homework!  No X-tra Math, no reading, or finishing any papers that come home.

Check out these happy faces today!  It's like the got the GOLDEN ticket from Wonka!

SNOW Investigations

We had so much fun after the first snow fall!  We did a fun inference activity called Snow Day Investigations.

First we read the story, The Snowy Day.  Then, we brain stormed all the activities that we could do on a snowy day.  Boy did we come up with a lot.

The next day, we heard a story.  Here it is...

Then, we were put into 5 different groups.  Each group was given an envelop of evidence with a letter attached.  As a group we had to look at the evidence and infer what Tim and Grandma did on Tim's day off.  

One of the envelopes of evidence.

Some evidence along with the evidence form to help us organize our inferences.

Hard at work sorting through the evidence to determine what Tim and Grandma did.

The next day, we put all  of our evidence together.  Some clues from one group supported clues from another group. For example one group had a blueberry muffin recipe and another group had a muffin wrapper.  

After putting all the evidence together and sharing our inferences.  We made a list of all the activities that Tim and Grandma did. 

Lastly, we used what we knew from the story and the evidence to create a timeline for Tim and Grandma's day.  We were able to determine that when Mom came, Tim and Grandma were at the 4:00pm showing of Big Hero 6.  

We had so much fun making inferences about Tim and Grandma's day.  We were just like detectives.  That is when Mrs. Wanke told us that when we read, we are READING detectives.  We have to sort through the clues the author gives us to infer what is happening or how a character is feeling.  

Check back to see how we continue to learn about making inferences!

3 Branches of Government

We started talking about the role of each of the three branches of government.  It was a little confusing for use to keep it all straight.

We watched a couple of cute videos to maybe help straighten it all out for us.

We started working on creating some graduated flash cards that will tell us who is in charge of each branch, what the power of each branch is, and why the each branch is important to our government functioning smoothly.  

We really discussed checks and balances and why it is important that no branch is more powerful than the other. 

We Give Books

I stumbled upon this GREAT website today where I can view many children's books for free.  All I had to do was create a free account.  Click the picture below to check it out!

Landform Cafe

Yesterday our room was transformed into the Landform Cafe!  Visitors were allowed to come in have a snack, view our landform projects and listen to our presentations.

There was such a great great creativity and variety with our projects.