'Alligator River' and 'If I Were Stranded...'

We have been busy bees here in the classroom with group work! Since my last post, we have done two more skill builders! The skills of your students have continued to amaze us! Their insights are very grown-up and they are getting better and better working together.


Last week we read a terrible story about a boy named Gregory and his friends. Each of the characters were bad in their own way! The students were given the task of deciding which students behaved the worst and rank them from best to worst. We came together as a group to compare our results and discuss both our results and our teamwork abilities.

Today we had another skill builder, which was AMAZING! The students have been kidnapped and stranded on a desert island with limited supplies! they were given materials to create a signal on the beach for a plane flying overhead. The students were so creative with their signals. They came up with everything from spelling words to using sea glass to reflect the sun's light and make a light to attract the plane. Others made runways for the plane to land, while others made arrows to point out their location.

Puzzle Skill Builder

For the past few weeks we have been working on building our group work skills. We have planned a trip to the moon and a camping trip. We had given the students a list of items that they could bring with them but they were only able to choose four. The students had to work together to decide which items they were going to bring with them. During these skill builders, the students have worked on strategies of good group work. Some of these include, listening to each others ideas, letting everyone have a turn, voting to make decisions, and everyone makes a contribution.

Today, we approached these skill builders a bit differently. We assigned roles to each of the students in the group in order for them to get acclimated to the jobs that they will have during the larger group work unit. The groups were then asked to work together to build a puzzle, using only the pieces, not the top. The students did an AMAZING job! They worked so well together and had a blast working in these groups. We had amazing discussions about their great group work strategies.

Next week, we will be working more on group work. We will focus more on the jobs that we created this week. These skill builders are preparation for a larger rotation of group work that the students will do during my solo weeks of teaching. i have no doubt that the students will do an amazing job because they have already done so well!

Eric Carle Paper

After going to the Flynn theater to see a puppet show on three of Eric Carle's books (The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the Little Could, and The Mixed Up Chameleon) we were inspired to create our own Eric Carle paper. We used a variety of materials, including toothbrushes, marble rolling, straw blowing, watercolors, tempra paints, and dot paints. We had lots of fun yesterday afternoon creating our own paper, which will create beuatiful pictures from next week!

Math: Measuring with Money

Yesterday we got to measure our feet with pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters! Mrs. M painted our feet and we got to make footprints on paper! During math, we got to use different money to see how long our feet were! Then we got to see how expensive our feet were by calculating how many cents our feet were long! It was lots of fun!

Welcome!

Welcome to my new blog page! This will keep you updated on lessons that I teach, work that your students are doing, and announcements that I'd like to share with you all! I hope to practice my parent communication skills through this blog. Here again is my e-mail if you want to contact me about anything. jefisher@cssu.org

Stay tuned for more!