Whew! Sleeping in this morning (until 7:30 at least) never felt so good! This first week back to school has been one for the books. I don't know if it's because it was the first week of school or because I am in a new grade level or a combination of both, but I felt overwhelmed at times and seemed to stay late or bring work home every day. That's not my normal. When I am home, I try not to do school stuff because I only get a few hours with my son before it's time for bed/bath. I sure hope I can get in a better routine next week. However, we had a GREAT first week of school!! I just need to work on time management better next week. Here's our week in a recap for Five for Friday!
1. Math - Y'all know I am all about being real. This summer I posted about how I was going to do Math About Me boards. Y'all, they were a flop! Ha! I'm not posting them, mainly because they have student's personal information on them. Some were really good. Some were wild. For example: I have 5,000 x 10,000 shirts. Really? 50,000,000 shirts? Crazy! LOL!
We did have one really fun Math activity, though! We read "The Warlord's Beads". In the story, Chuan and his father create a counting frame (precursor to the abacus) to help his father keep count of the things he has to count for the warlord.
We made our own counting frames to review place value and help us solve several problems! And we got to have a little snack while making them! I totally choked on my fruit loop and had fruit loops flying out of my mouth as I was choking and coughing....true story.
2. Writing - We lead up to Writer's Workshop by students helping me create a Writer's Workshop looks like/sounds like chart, along with expectations that we all agreed to.
We also made heart maps, which was our first writing activity.
3. Science - We began by learning about the Scientific Method and then participated in an activity called "What Is Your Lung Capacity?" Students really enjoyed this experiment. I hated covering faces in this photo because of the smiles I had to cover up!
4. Social Studies - We set up our SS notebooks with our first page being a short writing prompt: Why is Social Studies important? We shared and discussed what we thought after students finished writing.
Our first unit is Reconstruction, but I always like to start the year off with a little geography review. We reviewed cardinal and intermediate directions, as well as oceans and continents.
5. I was super excited to get a package in the mail this week from Scholastic! These books will be for a novel study we are doing later this year! Each book was only $1.00, but I used my points so I only paid $3.50 total and that was for shipping!
