Teaching with Ms. D: Did You Say Cold?

First thing I need to get off my chest this week is how much I LOVE these kids! I just look at them and my heart melts. Have we had a few bumps? Yes. Are some days harder than others? You bet. Does that mean I love them any less? No way. We had another great week at CES!

This week we completed our important cities t-shirt project. Students were assigned a city at random and had to make a t-shirt with information to represent that city. We then practiced our presentations and shared what we learned with each other and next week I will hang our shirts on the "line" for everyone to see! Here are a few exceptional examples!

We also reviewed what we knew about the Civil War by watching an episode of America the Story of Us. This is a great series that PBS put out a few years ago. It is a documentary, but it plays out like the latest action movie in theaters due to it's awesome special effects and break downs. This episode was a little "gross" as some kiddos put it because it breaks down the true nature of war--death. We are going to be talking and seeing a lot of mature things this year in history related to many different wars. We talked about how war is ugly and how often the death and destruction are never realized and misunderstood because everyone avoids the tough issues.

In math, we made a graphic organizer to help us keep straight how to convert between fractions, decimals, and percentages (FDP)! I forgot to take a picture of a notebook, but here is a quick pic of one of the day's notes board.

I love this unit because everyone gets so excited when they discover percents! The light bulbs quickly turn on at how easy it is to convert between these three types of numbers and how they relate. It's a breath of fresh air because you wouldn't believe how many adults try to tell me fractions, decimals, and percentages have nothing to do with each other! We each started an FDP quilt square that will be compiled into an entire quilt next week that I can't wait to share with everyone! I know it is going to look stellar!

We started our spiral warm ups in math this week. Instead of practice questions related to what we are always studying in the moment, these warm ups are a set of quick questions that help us review our skills all year long and keep practicing them, even when we learned it 6 months ago. One of the questions this week was to classify the date as a prime or composite number. Well, September 1st is neither because one is just it's own little creature! A couple of students taught me a term they made up last year to classify one: Cream! It's neither prime nor composite, but cream is a mixture of both doing it's own thing. You learn something new everyday!

Other exciting things this week:

Starting a book challenge page attached to this blog (the tab beside Home)! Check it out!

Students saying it was actually cold in our classroom! Brrrr!

A student from last year telling me the number of nice things she has said to people since I challenged her class last year to be kind to others and spread happiness by genuinely complimenting at least one person every week.

The election of our SCA officers and classroom representatives for this year! Check out these wicked cool posters!

A first grader telling me how much she loved Ms. Punzel (my alter ego she has deemed me with since arriving at CES).

Chaotic Crafts during enrichment period. The result: masks that we could wear during non-class times. This may seem unproductive, but let me tell you the enthusiasm and creativity during this time was on point! Sometimes there are more important things than book smarts...like filling the soul with happiness and imagination.

Fantastic discussion during our weekly meeting about how it is better to try and fail, then to cheat and win!

Compliments on how well we did during the lockdown drill. One visitor to our classroom commented it looked like we had been practicing everyday for weeks! Definitely shows how serious we were taking safety in our classroom!

Seeing students past and present at the football game while selling concessions with Mrs. Thomas! While I have a ton of fun going, these are my favorite games to watch!