Mr. Reynolds' Learning Blog

Evolving Education

2012-01-24T18:34:00.000-06:00

Last week Apple made a major announcement about digital text books and authoring tools that will undoubtedly have an impact on the education market and community. One part of the announcement included the release of the iTunes U app that puts an enormous collection of educational courses at the fingertips of anyone with the app. The content covers a vast spectrum of study topics and has great materials for teaching and learning. iTunes U will connect people all over the world with access to educational content like never before. How can this not change the future of textbooks and learning? At the time of this post there were already 3 million iTunes U downloads.

This means there is a reliable, scholarly repository of information for anyone to access. What does it mean for your children and their school work? Will it have an immediate impact in your child's classroom, home or anywhere else they have an enabled learning device? Like many-a-thing in education it must be played with, learned, and applied in appropriate contexts. I can tell you that I downloaded the app and did a quick search for ecosystems because that is what our current research topic is for fourth grade. I was surprised to find an entire course on ecosystems. The course was not created for 9 and 10 year olds but some of the videos and other materials are definitely relevant for students investigating Earth's biomes. So what did I do with what I found? I shared it. I shared it with students, teachers, parents, and you! Some of the students understood the language and vocabulary while it was over the heads of others. But that's what education has become. What works for one, might not work for another and that's okay. Right now, this is another tool to add to the belt for the battle of innovation in education.

Looking ahead, imagine what access to this kind of information will do for learners. Think of the possibilities for accessing reliable content when researching and learning at any age. And I haven't mentioned iBooks 2 or iBooks Author because I am still investigating and looking for an opportunity to toggle with them. From what I have seen, this is a new, intuitive kind of textbook "experience". The interactivity has set a new president for what digital textbooks will look like and how functional they should be. Of course there are practical concerns to address, such as the need to have Apple products to use some of the apps. Instead I choose to focus on the progress that has been made when three major American textbook publishers partner with one of the most influential and successful technology companies in the world. Until access to this content is available in every public school classroom across our country, I'll continue to learn about new educational tools and find ways to incorporate them into the hands of the students I teach everyday.

Winter MAP Testing

2012-01-17T07:50:00.003-06:00

Hello All! The next two weeks in our school will be adjusted to our winter MAP testing schedule. Reminder, MAP (Measure of Academic Progress) tests are administered three times a school year and give us a snapshot of student growth in math and reading areas. Data from these tests is used to guide and individualize student and classroom instruction in the content areas of math and reading.

Our class will take the math test this Wednesday, January 18 from 9:30-10:45am and the reading test next Monday, January 23 from 8:15-9:45am. Please be sure your child gets plenty of rest and a good breakfast the morning of each testing day. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me or visit the MAP Testing homepage at www.nwea.org.

Getting Down to Business

2011-12-16T12:31:00.000-06:00

This time of year always seems to be a frenzy of activities from the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales day in November all the way through New Years celebrations. Everywhere I go I see signs and flyers advertising a sale with the "perfect gift" for "that special someone." This time of year also means a busy and somewhat chaotic environment in our fourth grade classroom. The month of December has been dedicated to a business unit for fourth graders. The project is an aggregate of various content area pieces including the writing of a formal persuasive business letter, creating a marketing plan, developing a budget, and collaborating with business partners. There is plenty of study that precedes the creation of a business plan; some lessons include reading and discussion about teamwork, entrepreneurship, economics, marketing, financial decision-making, and persuasive writing.

All of this work is direct preparation for selling products in stores during three days of sales in the "4th Grade Mall." This project has been going on in our school for many years and children look forward to the opportunity to be an entrepreneur. It's also a great way to keep students engaged, motivated, and working together in the weeks and days leading up to a long winter break. Check out the commercials some students made to advertise their business.

Business owners in all fourth grade classes get a chance to see how well they designed and marketed their products when first, second and third grade students shop at their stores. For three days our classroom (and the entire fourth grade pod) is transformed in one shopping mecca. It's a great experience for producers and consumers. Some kids even find just the right knick-knacks to give their loved ones!

Happy Holidays!

The Reformation of Research

2011-11-30T15:29:00.001-06:00

It was just about six weeks ago that the entire fourth grade in my school embarked on their first major research project of the school year. The entire learning structure was designed to offer specific learning opportunities for children throughout the project. Planning and preparation was time consuming at the start, there was constant guidance and remediated instruction occurring during the weeks of research and investigation, and there needed to be a final evaluation measure for end products. But at least three constants maintained throughout the project: learning outcomes (goals); connected learning, inside and outside the school building; student responsibility for demonstration of learning. And yes, I am talking about fourth graders.

The project was not a solo creation by any stretch of the imagination. The fourth grade team worked together with support staff, administration, parents, resource teachers and students to develop a learning project that would capture interest and offer opportunities to learn in an individualized manner. Was it abstract at the onset? A little, yes. Did we have discussions and challenge ideas? At times, yes. Were there failures and discoveries? Of course, shouldn't all learning experiences have those? It was a new kind of teaching and learning for some of the people involved but eventually it made sense and we were there to support each other and help one another through. In the end, we all had the same goals in mind.

There were quite a few tools students used to develop and deliver a final project. Here are some of the more valuable ones. Google Docs - Drafting, revising, sharing, peer-editing, commenting, all made possible through Google Apps for education. I also used Google Forms to create a basic survey for students to offer feedback about the project. After all, some of the best ideas for student projects often come from students! EasyBib - A simple, free-to-use citation tool that enabled 9 and 10 year old children to create bibliographies that could pass even the toughest teacher's reference standards. Wordle - Basic "word-cloud" generator that allowed students to analyze their writing in a different way and offered a pretty nifty looking visual for their final projects. Glogster for Education - this web-based multimedia poster platform was the perfect presentation tool. Kids were able to organized linked or uploaded videos, pictures, sound files, and text in a way they wanted. When it came time to share what they had learned, Glogster was all they needed. (Okay, you're right, some of the kids still wanted to use notecards because public speaking is still nerve-wracking, even for some adults!)

The level of student ownership for learning is unlike any other activity we've done this year. One of the most powerful motivators was the idea that one part of the project, their glogs, could be published to a global audience. Students worked hard to create a product that they thought could be proud of. See some examples for yourself! Please rate them! Kids will love the feedback and Glogster points!

Great Barrier Reef - Amazon River - Mount Everest - Grand Canyon

Sahara Desert - Glacier National Park - Mount Rainier

Fourth Grade Research

2011-10-17T16:58:00.000-05:00

Today we officially launched into the first fourth grade research project of the year. This project focuses on landforms. Students will choose a landform, any landform in the world, and investigate it like a geographer. They will ask their own questions and seek to find answers. They will learn about the geography, climate, and culture that surrounds their landform. They will discover knowledge and demonstrate their understanding in ways that make sense to them. This is an exciting opportunity to put the responsibility of learning in the hands of the learners, with teachers and parents there to guide and help them along the way.

The research project covers multiple content areas and includes valuable enrichment opportunities for students of all abilities. Some children will showcase previously known "academic" skill while others may uncover talent they never knew they had. And although the "structure" of the project is designed for all learners, the variety of formal and informal assesments will be many. Students will practice and develop better reading and writing skills when they takes notes from a variety of books and develop word maps. They will enhance their ability to analyze text and information when visiting sites on the Internet as they search for reliable sources. They will be asked to think critically when they must explain how a landform formed and evolved to the state we see it in today. The project will be time consuming and challening, but it will be an incredible learning experience for many.

One of the aspects of the project I am most anxious to work with children on is the final presentation. With so many wonderful creation options and powerful web tools, students are going to have a variety of ways to share with their peers what they've learned. From something as simple as a powerpoint or a more robust creation tool like Glogster to a scripted dramatic reading or play, everyone will be able to present their learning in a way they choose. It's going to be a 6 week long adventure of learning so check back around Thanksgiving to see final projects!

Walk to School Week

2011-09-29T10:16:00.000-05:00

Next week the Mann School community is rallying its members to participate in active transportation for Walk to School Week. The whole week children are encouraged (and rewarded) for walking or rolling to school, in anything powered by human energy. This is an awesome week for practicing and teaching the importance of living an active, healthy and earth-conscious lifestyle! Classrooms will be tallying totals of how kids get to school and graphing results. To help support the week's activities, encourage your children to wear colored shirts for each day. Click here for the full handout. Here's the list:

Monday, Oct. 3 – Wear Red for Transportation Safety
Tuesday, Oct. 4 – Wear Blue for Water Conservation
Wednesday, Oct. 5 – Wear Green for Reducing Waste in Landfills
Thursday, Oct. 6– Wear Yellow for Conserving Electricity – Turn it Off!
Friday, Oct. 7 – Wear your Favorite Sports Team Colors – Stay Active!

One fun activity for each class during the week will be on-bike training. Our P.E. teacher will be leading on-bike safety lessons with children during gym class. We ask that your child bring their bike to school on the day they have physicial education. (Our class needs their bikes on Friday, October 7.) And have no fear about the bike lessons because Mrs. Garcia is a certified on-bike instructor!

As a final event for the week, there will be a mini Walk-a-thon. We are trying to get as many school community members to join in walking laps around our park. The goal is to walk as many laps as possible and break our record from last year! There will be teachers, parents and, of course, kids!! Everyone can help to make this week a success getting involved! A huge THANK YOU to the Mann PTO for organizing all the events and activities! Hope to see you out there!

The Purpose of Edmodo

2011-09-22T10:25:00.001-05:00

Last week I wrote an overview of web tools I am using with students because I wanted to give readers a list of things I'm trying with students using laptop computers on a regular basis in a fourth grade classroom. The whole process is a learning curve for me as a classroom teacher because I am trying to balance and integrate different parts of curriculum, organize multiple content areas, and adjust to a spectrum of student abilities. (Prior knowledge, previous experiences, academic ability, and tech skill, to name a few). But in this post I really want to focus on one tool that is helping mess everything together: Edmodo.

As a teacher, this social learning network is a convenient way for me to share important information, notes, links, and other online media directly with students. It offers another form of communication from teacher to students but also students to students. It's a great discussion platform for topics we cover in class; both for ideas we don't get to spend enough time discussing and ones we want to explore more deeply. Edmodo is set up to allow students a unique way to participate in discussions, one that focuses on their voice and words. It allows them to read other children's thoughts and enrich their own ideas or understandings about an issue in a way that doesn't always happen in a traditional classroom discussion.

Another benefit of Edmodo is that it helps children practice grammar (and typing) skills and focus on their audience. When a child posts on a discussion, they learn quickly that their audience is reading and analyzing their comments without physically looking at them; as opposed to the traditional face-to-face classroom exchanges. In some cases, students are more receptive to written text than verbal cues because they are focused on words and thought, not face and person.

For now, I am expecting students to learn how to use Edmodo as a discussion tool for exchanging ideas(with an additional emphasis on typing, writing, and grammar practice). It is also a great platform to teach children how to use web tools, appropriate internet use, and communicate effectively. As the school year evolves, so will our use of this social learning network. If you are still wondering about social media in the classroom, read this. Children are going to learn about social media somewhere, why not in school?

Students Use Web Tools!

2011-09-14T12:47:00.002-05:00

There is a seemingly endless number of web-based tools for just about anything you can think of in education and beyong... creation, sharing, collaborating, developing and communicating, just to name a few. The daunting fact of this reality is that the number of web tools is growing and not everyone knows exactly where to start. Finding just the right tool can be a challenge, regardless of the desired outcome.

But one of the wonderful things about web tools is that when you find the right one, it can make a project or task increasingly engaging and a final product incredibly valuable. This year I am using a foundation of five web-based tools in my fourth grade classroom, with others to be utilized as needed throughout the year. The big five for my students so far this year are Edmodo, ConnectED, Xtra Math, Custom Typing and Google Docs. Each of these domains offer very specific tools for assignments and skill development for nine and ten year olds. They also offer great opportunities for children to acquire technology skills and develop their Internet awareness.

The power of each tool can be calculated according to student outcomes and progress. For example, Xtra Math can be great practice or mindless repetition, depending on how the student approaches it. On the one hand, a child might be very engaged and love competing against a timer to practice basic math fact knowledge, which is ideal. On the other hand, a student might not be motivated to do repetitive fact practice, even though they don't know all their basic facts. In which case, there are plenty of other ways to learn and practice math facts. The final outcome of any approach, however, is the end result of student effort and ability.

As my class and school continue to learn the power of these tools, we will undoubtedly find others that will help us with assignments, projects and assessments throughout the year. An awesome aspect of many of these tools and portals is the variety of ways students learn to use and manage them. Most importantly, the tools have a very specific purpose in the learning process for students. And it is important to make the children aware of that fact.

New Family Potluck

2011-09-06T13:39:00.000-05:00

Mann School PTO invites all families to: New Family Night

Thursday, September 15th - 6:30 pm Mann School Cafeteria

Please join us for pizza and an opportunity to meet the principal, members of the PTO board and some Mann “veteran” families! Bring the whole family, your questions & if your last name begins with:

A-L: Please bring an appetizer

M-Z: Please bring a dessert

Please contact Kyla Lombardo at 708.763.9339 or kylalou@yahoo.com to R.S.V.P. on or before September 14th. Volunteers needed too!

Establishing Routines

2011-08-30T17:39:00.000-05:00

One of the most important aspects of the beginning of the school year is establishing and learning routines; for our classroom, school and learning habits. The first three days were great for introducing most of the classroom expectations and routines which, like most things, get better with practice. From our classroom morning routine that prepares students for the school day to our end of the day routine that prepares students for their workload and parent communication, students are being taught and reminded of necessary routines to help foster community and student success.

Throughout this first full week of school, all students (and teachers for that matter) in our classroom will be learning and practicing classroom expectations and responsibilities. At times the learning curve can seem pretty steep. Be rest assured that the guidelines and expectations are designed with student learning outcomes in mind. The better we adapt to the design and structure of our new learning environment, the more we will all be able to focus on the real point of our school system: learning and having fun!

Be sure to attend the Fourth Grade Curriculum Night this Thursday, September 1 at 6pm in the auditorium to get more information about the new school year! You will also have an opportunity to sign up for parent/teacher conferences and our exciting Mystery Speaker program! I hope to see you there!

First Day of School

2011-08-24T15:06:00.001-05:00

Welcome back to another school year full of opportunity, relationship, challenge, failure and success! Yes, that's right, failure is just as predicatable as success; in some cases even more predictable and in many cases more valuable. Learning to handle the results of failure and success will serve children well in all they do. I hope you are ready to help your children flourish and flounder with the inevitable success and failure they must endure during the new school year.

There are few things that excite me more than a classroom of children full of emotion. The first day of school is unique in that way because students have so many different feelings; anxious to see their friends again, nervous about new situations, excited for new experiences, and scared of the unkown.. just to name a few. But there is also something unique about a classroom of children gathering together at the start of a new school year that really intrigues me. Maybe it's the fresh start to build a community, an opportunity to mold character, or the anticipation of inspiring a child toward a new interest or hobby. Whatever it is, there are very few days on the calendar like the first day of school and I am lucky to have been a part of one for the last 23 years.

With the first day over, and the journey of a new year underway, I look forward to the success and failure I will experience with my students, but most of all the opportunity to learn and grow with a group of children in a way only a teacher can. Thank you parents!!

Social Media and a New School Year

2011-08-22T11:23:00.000-05:00

In an ever-changing and rapidly evolving world, digital learning and social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, Skype and the like have declared their place in human existence. As teachers, we have an obligation to teach students about these kinds of digital tools and guide them with effective, practical and purposeful instruction for their use. Some of you may be familiar with some education specific online learning tools and social networks such as Edmodo and Kidblog, but there is continually growing list of online tools that are incredibly useful for student projects, assessment, and learning.

As we all embark on another school year, I ask you to think about social media in your life and in the lives of our children. Ask yourself and children some questions about what you know and how these platforms have influenced your life and the world around you. I also ask you to start the conversation, if you haven't already, with your family and friends about the utility of these digital media tools in the education of our children. If you are still hesitant about social media, read this recent article from the Post-Ops in the Washington Post. There are two sides to any story but we all must realize that today's youth are finding ways to use these tools. It is our obligation as parents and educators to help them use these platforms safely as global citizens of an interconnected world.

Already August

2011-08-04T09:46:00.001-05:00

Aloha Readers! It's been awhile since my last post and that is mostly because I've had a summer full of travel and adventure. With August already here and the school year only three weeks away, I thought I should check in a give an update. I hope all of you have had ample opportunity to get outdoors this summer for adventure, exploration and physical activity. Summer is a great time to plays sports, travel, hang out with family and friends, and just relax! The picture below is one I took while visiting my friend in Alaska. For more of my travel photos from the summer (and past summers) click on my slideshow in the upper right hand corner of my blog. There is still some time get out of your house and enjoy the summer sun!

(An overlook of Cook Inlet from atop Penguin Peak, just outside Girdwood, Alaska.)

Motorcycles and Philanthropy

2011-05-24T12:59:00.000-05:00

This week our class was surprised by yet another Mystery Speaker. This week's speaker combined a passion for Harley Davidson with a desire to help others in a unique combination of hobby and philanthropy. The speaker, and his small motorcycle crew, shared special memories from their lives as motorcycle riders and talked about the importance of responsibility and safety that comes with owning a "bike". Then, one of the riders shared the connection they all had to Toys For Tots. All of the riders participate in an annual motorcycle ride that collects tons of toys for Chicagoland children that aren't fortunate enough to get toys as gifts during the holiday season.

A big thanks to this week's Mystery Speaker for taking the time to visit our school and share some experiences and information about his life. We have only one Mystery Speaker left for this school year!

One Room Schoolhouse

2011-05-13T13:03:00.000-05:00

Recently, our class took a trip to The Grove in Glenview, Illinois. The bus ride was like traveling through time because when students exited the bus, they were whisked back to Illinois life in 1862. The morning was spent in a one room school house learning the way prairie children did; reciting their ABCs, writing with quills and being disciplined by the schoolmarm. The afternoon was spend learning the tools and trade of building a prairie home and managing chores on the homestead. It was a fantastic trip full of learning experiences and Illinois History. Click the links below to read some student reflections from the day and watch the video clip from the one room schoolhouse.

Student Reflection from HMS03

Student Reflection from HMS05

Student Reflection from HMS08

Student Reflection from HMS10

Student Reflection from HMS18

The Final Month

2011-05-03T12:46:00.000-05:00

As we continue to get taunted by the sunshine and warm weather days, the countdown to summer continues. With the turn of a new month, some student projects come to an end and others begin. Poetry packets were a great success and children were all given an opportunity to share one of their favorites with the class during our mini "poetry-slam." Children were also able to celebrate the completion of another final project when the announcement was made about our Global Virtual Classroom website. Click here to see the announcement or click the "GVC" tab at the top of the blog to find out more. It was definitely a great learning experience!

Another great learning experience came from our most recent Mystery Speaker. He spoke about his career as an engineer and the process of building a structure. He used good analogies about things familiar to fourth graders to connect planning, designing and construction of a modern building; like one of his most recent projects at Argonne National Laboratory. Check out a time-lapse video of the work site. After the presentation students were prompted to write about the planning process of something they have done in their life. It was surprising to me how many of them wrote about projects they had to develop for school, such as student businesses and performances. A big Thank You to our Mystery Speaker for taking time out of his work schedule to share experiences and knowledge with our fourth graders!

A "Mystery Speaker" guides students through the process of constructing a building from scratch.

April Showers

2011-04-20T14:21:00.001-05:00

It certainly has been a month full of rain... and sleet, and drizzle, and hail... and, yes, some snow. But one great thing about learning is that it is not dependent upon the weather. Actually, extreme weather conditions allow for some very unique, and often timely, learning opportunities. It does however hamper our outdoor recess time, which is a necessity during these spring days!

The classroom has been swirling with poetry this month. As April is National Poetry Month, all fourth graders have been working on creating an individual poetry booklet. Each booklet will have eight unique, original poems and two poems from professional poets. Students have been sharing poems with each other aloud in class and in written form on Edmodo. If you would like to see a collection of class poems, ask your child to log into Edmodo and share some with you. The cumulative assessment for the poetry unit will be a published poetry booklet due at the end of the month.

In conjunction with our poetry unit, we just finished reading Love That Dog by Sharon Creech. It was a short novel told from the perspective of a student learning and growing as a young poet. Much of the discussion spurred from the book was focused on interpreting poems and reactions of students to the development of the main character as a poet. Check out the neat little book trailer here.

Our most recent shake-up to the traditional walls of school learning was a trip to Argonne National Laboratory. This was a fantastic field trip full of opportunities for children to not only see first hand demonstrations of applications for liquid nitrogen, such as superconductivity. Students were able to construct the colors of the visible spectrum through the testing of items in a photospectrometer. Below you will see a clip of students pedaling on an energy bicycle designed. The bike was an opportunity for students to experience the amount of energy required to illuminate different kinds of light bulbs and a hair dryer. The kids had excellent behavior and enjoyed the trip tremendously!

GVC - The Final Product

2011-04-05T08:44:00.001-05:00

After a week of rest and relaxation our first day back was chalk full of energy and conversations about all the great things students did with time away from school. It was great to see many of them staying "connected" through Edmodo. With families traveling and others keeping busy, or just taking it easy in Oak Park, everyone had an opportunity to communicate with each other via our online learning community. Most of the conversations were about entertainment things like movies and TV shows while others were offering detailed comments about unique experiences. It is really amazing how quickly fourth graders can learn to harness an online tool for keeping in touch.

Staying in the "connected" world, our Global Virtual Classroom project and contest has come to an end. If you thought fourth graders communicating together online was impressive, have a look at the website they created with students from Shumway Elementary School in Chandler, Arizona. The theme for our research and web design was Numbers. Students from both classrooms investigated the world around them to learn about the overwhelming presence and significance of numbers. Both groups of students worked very hard and should be commended for their efforts. Please visit our webpage to see the final product. A big THANK YOU to our partners in Arizona for their collaboration!

Froebel Block Workshop

2011-03-09T12:34:00.000-06:00

Yesterday we had an art educator from the Frank Lloyd Wright Home & Studio visit our classroom to lead students through a workshop using Froebel Blocks. This hands-on workshop was a precursor to the Frank Lloyd Wright walking field trip we are taking next week. Here is a video of one of the students working through some of the designs.

With ISAT make-ups taking place this week, our classroom is slowly moving back into a student work zone. With Ecosystems reports finished up, we now moved student work efforts toward presentations of videos, podcasts, Powerpoints, and brochures. Presentations are still expected to be done completely by students and we are hoping to have many of them finished this week. Our Global Virtual Classroom project is quickly winding down as well. We will have a finished website up by the time spring break rolls around.

Thanks for reading and hopefully you are keeping up with your child on Edmodo! If you haven't checked in with them lately, have them log in for you. There's lots of good web-content being passed around!

ISAT Prep

2011-02-24T10:57:00.000-06:00

Many of you are well aware that next week our students will be taking the Illinois Standards Achievement Test. A test better known as the ISAT. In the weeks leading up to these state-mandated tests, I've learned quite a few different strategies for "teaching to the test." Rest assured, our class has been learning to think all year long, which should favor them on a series of multiple choice tests. We have been reviewing concepts, terms, and question sets they might see on the test, as well as strategies for answering questions. Review and exposure to test constraints and terms should only help prepare students for next week. Regardless of personal opinions on standardized testing, we have to do it. So I have been preparing kids the best way I can; teaching them to think.

No single test score should define any one student, and it's simply impossible to get to know a child by looking at their answers on a multiple choice test. Do ISATs give an indication of retained knowledge of skills and concepts? Sure. Do ISATs tell us how well our students can collaborate, create, analyze and problem solve (some of the more common 21st century skills)? Not exactly. How can you best prepare your child for standardized testing? Encourage and support them to do their best and help them understand how important it is to be able to work with others and think for themselves. Of course a healthy dinner, good night sleep, and well-balanced breakfast will help fuel their brains to be at their best. So be sure to do that too.

If you feel the need to "study" for the ISATs, head over to Illinois State Board of Education's website and have a look at some of the sample tests. You can even try a convenient interactive test. When the first ISAT comes next Monday, I think most of my students will be thinking more about the lack of homework for the week than the significance of a standardized test score. Children are more than just a test score. But you already knew that.

What are your thoughts about standardized testing? Please feel free to share them below. This is a conversation we, as educational stakeholders, should be able to have.

February Update

2011-02-15T13:10:00.002-06:00

It's warm, then cold, snowy then rainy, blizzard and then a heat wave. The inconsistent weather always has students wondering whether we will be inside or out for recess almost every day. Fortunately for our academic side of things, the schedule is more consistent than the weather. Please make sure your children are going to school dressed for the weather, just like you send them to school with all their school supplies and a healthy lunch and snack. Please keep in mind if you are sending snacks or treats for the entire class that you ensure they are gluten-free and nut-free (cannot be processed in factory with nuts). For a list of gluten-free snacks, click here. Thank you for considering the dietary needs of our students.

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen has taken over our reading curriculum and inspired all kinds of comprehension opportunities, including the formation of new literature circles. These discussion groups are student-centered and designed to help students practice asking questions, making inferences and connections, increasing vocabulary skills, and visualization abilities. Each student has a responsibility to prepare for discussion groups and participate in conversations about readings. In addition to discussion groups our class is continuing to work on writing chapter summaries, making predictions, and answering short chapter quizzes.

Research, research, research. Science research on ecosystems is now growing from outlines to rough drafts. As students begin writing rough drafts, they are asked to focus on creating a topic sentence for each of the five paragraphs and adding supporting details to compose complete paragraphs. The idea surrounding a complete paragraph includes at least five quality sentences that use correct grammar and focus on the main idea. Following rough drafts, students will engage in peer-editing before composing final drafts next week. They will be working on oral presentations, supported by some technology infused visual aid, in March.

Our Global Virtual Classroom project continues as students are now combining research with graphics in preparation for web page development. Students have uncovered much information about NUMBERS in our world and are creating graphics and organizers to represent what they have discovered. In the weeks ahead, our class will be collaborating with our virtual classmates in Arizona to develop a final web site devoted to our them. Students will be using Kompozer, a free web-design application, to create the website. They have been using programs like Pixie, Kidspiration, Microsoft Word, and some free Web 2.0 tools to compile their research and develop their graphics. The due date for our final website is the end of March. For more information, explore the GVC tab at the top of the blog.

Thanks for reading and keep checking back. The blog is being continually updated with resources and information from our fourth grade school experiences.

Design

2011-02-02T09:53:00.000-06:00

Another Mystery Speaker stopped by this week to talk with us about the importance of math and science when designing new products and ideas. He also shared with us about the role of software in creating designs. After a few videos to show the assembling process of jet planes and other aerospace designs, students were asked to create and explain a design of their own. It was interesting to see and hear all the great ideas fourth graders have!

Design is an important aspect of any successful product or invention. This was a great opportunity for children to see a direct connection of the math, science, and thinking skills they learn and practice in school. Kids are naturally creative and inventive, they just need an opportunity to explore their thinking and channel their thoughts in a way that helps them create. Thanks to Mr. Chapman for coming by to share his experience and knowledge with our class.

Scientist Visit

2011-01-20T15:41:00.000-06:00

Our class was delighted to have a visit from an active scientist today. The visit is in partnership with the Oak Park Education Foundation's Global Village Program that exposes students to scientists and the kinds of professions they have. For more information, head over to Mrs. D's 4th Grade Blog! There are also more research links on her blog, too.

A Dramatic Undertaking

2011-01-19T12:46:00.000-06:00

I have been encouraging students all year long to tell me when they are interested in something and want to know more-I believe intrinsic motivation to be the most valuable form. Some students approached me about performing a play published in a Scholastic News issue. When they assured me there were enough parts for everyone in the class, that they would gather props and create ones they didn't have, I had no choice but to support their ambition. Two weeks later we are on the verge of a student directed performance called "The Crossing." The play is about the pivotal moment in American history when George Washington decided to forge the Delaware River in a plan to advance in the Revolutionary War. When the play wraps up at the end of this week, students will be video recording the performance and I will post it on the blog. Students will also be performing this act for our first grade buddies, as well. Come back next week to see the play!

Parent teacher conferences are right around the corner: February 1-5. You will receive an e-mail with the time and date of your conference. The schedule will follow the sign-up from the fall conferences. If you already know the corresponding time in February is not good for you, please e-mail me and we will find one that works.

Hopefully by now your child has explained to you the two research projects they are currently working on; ecosystems and numbers. Students have time to research at school but also make an effort to research more information at home. They should be recording notes on the book or web-source citation pages they received in the media center. There are also extra copies in the classroom. When focusing research efforts, I encourage students to ask questions and search for answers. Researching can be very confusing is there is no direction. Questions help to focus research. Good luck!

Work Flow

2011-01-12T12:37:00.000-06:00

Hello Readers! We finally got some snow to cover the barren land the rain created over winter break. Snow on the ground just seems to make January feel more like winter. Now in the second week of school in the new year we are trying a different approach to completing classroom assignments and responsibilities. The idea is called Work Flow. It's simply a different way of presenting weekly tasks and projects. Students are responsible to complete all of the tasks in the flow by the end of the week. Items get added and erased as our focus shifts.

Research is quickly becoming a major component of the education process for all age levels. In fourth grade we are beginning research for two different subjects and topics. This will be a delicate balance for students but hopefully the research skills learned will be directly applied to both topics. Numbers research is for our GVC project. (The purpose of this project is to built a website that gives something back to the global community. We are focusing on the way numbers connect everyone.) We are investigating the way numbers are presented and utilized for various things in our lives. Example: One student recently discovered ISBN on the back of books and is now researching the origins, purpose and value of ISBNs on books. Ecosystems research is for a science project that leads into students creating living ecosystems in the classroom. For more information on research and age-appropriate research sites for your children, please click the "Research" tab at the top of the blog.

Winter MAP testing starting in District 97 this week and will continue through January 26. Our class took the reading test on Monday and will take the Math test on Tuesday, January 24. Complete students reports and data will be available during parent/teacher conferences in early February. These test results are great for measuring student progress and developing student centered learning goals.

Scholastic News is becoming an integral part of our weekly routine. Not only do issues provide current events for students but activity sheets focus and enriching skills and concepts listed in our nation's Core Common Standards. Many of these standards are also some of the standards that the annual ISAT assesses. There are great articles and coverage of many major American and world events. So if your child comes home one day talking about a controversial topic or referencing popular news events, they probably got it from Scholastic News. Today's news is tomorrow's history!

Happy New Year!

2011-01-05T12:15:00.000-06:00

A new year can mean many things for many people. In the academic world it usually means the second half of the year is here with an opportunity to build on successes or learn from failures of the first half of the school year. Even though our classroom is full of fourth graders, this holds true for elementary teachers and students too. I hope your winter break was full of fun family time as well as restful moments of relaxation. Below is a picture from the ice skating field trip we took prior to winter break. Happy New Year!

(Thanks to a class parent for the photo!)

Already a few days into the new year, students are back into the swing of things and the learning process has continued. We will be putting in a significant amount of time and effort into developing a website with our Global Virtual Classmates (GVC). We will also continue communicating with them in a variety of ways to learn more about students in other parts of the United States and world. The next project we are hoping to share with them is an interactive post-it type board with pictures and writings about experiences our fourth graders had over winter break. For this, children were asked to bring in one picture that captures their best winter break experience. We will be using a web 2.0 tool called Stixy for creation. Check back for more information and a link to the final project.

The Shopping Experience

2010-12-15T13:08:00.000-06:00

Business has been booming since we opened our stores on Monday! With more than 300 shoppers in three days business owners needed to find ways to keep inventory stocked and customers satisfied. Not to mention owners needed to keep close record of their sales and management side of things. All in all, the business unit has been a great sample of what the business world holds. Below you will see a walk-through of the Reynolds' Shop at the 4th Grade Mall. Happy Shopping!

Thanks to all the parents and other family members for making it up to our corner of the school to shop. It seemed that most of our customers had no problem spending their $10 credit cards!

Reynolds Mall - Day 1

2010-12-13T15:10:00.000-06:00

We are open for business! See the commercials and advertisements for some of the Reynolds' Mall stores below. (Commercials were an optional, free way to advertise businesses.)

Click Here to see advertisements students made for their businesses.

Getting Down to Business

2010-12-05T13:33:00.001-06:00

Business season is upon everyone in the fourth grade! Last week students were introduced to the business unit and students found business partners, filled out a business proposal, and started manufacturing products. Below are paragraphs from students that offer a little insight into the kinds of businesses they have created.

My friends and I have made a business of Lego’s. We have made a gas station, cars and helicopters. We are going to make more Lego vehicles. We are going to raffle off stuffed animals. I sell tons of Lego’s with my friends Logan and peter and we sell, Lego’s for 3$ or less

The businesses my partners and I are running have lots of cool things. One thing we are selling is crazy bones. They are cool because they come in different figures. Our name is #1 Shop on Earth. Another thing we are selling paper airplanes. They are cool because some fly far and some fly high. The last thing we are selling are sports cards. They are cool because they come in different teams and different teams.

Our Ideas for Fun Stuff inc. are based on fun stuff to play with. My partner Aidan and I have a crafts idea where Aidan and I make design strips and design airplane crafts. Another idea we had was to sell sports balls. Our idea for advertisement was to draw posters on a piece of paper.

My friend and I are starting our own business. Our business idea is to sell yarn products such as necklaces, bracelets, and anklets. We are making a lot of these and we need a lot of yarn. We are also raffling off stuffed toys and bouncy balls.

Our business is called MVS (most valuable store). At our store we will sell trading cards, raffle tickets we will raffle off a mystery box we will also sell,Toys and tattoos, pens, and book marks. All of these will be selling for 2.00 dollars or less. So all of this will be sold in the third floor pod in Mr. Reynolds classroom. Please look around the pod for posters. Don’t forget to buy from MVS.

In Mr. Reynolds class room my friends and I are starting a business. The name of are store is A.K.E Wacky Nick Knacks. We are selling all types of things. Three people own the store, they are Avery, Kelly, and Emma. We make bracelets, paper frogs, and bookmarks. We decorate pencils but we do not make the things we are going to raffle. We hope you visit are store.

I am going to start a business called “J’s and F’s Arts and Crafts” with Francis. For our business, we will have a well lit, comfortable store, and will welcome any customers. Baseball cards, bakugan, crazy bones, finger knitting, lanyards, paper airplanes and paper robots will be for sale. Reasonable prices will be charged.

Hannah and I have a business. Our business is called HanaLine. The store sells flubber, short stories, and crafts. The prices are flubber $2-3, short stories $1, and crafts $1-2. We will also have a raffle. That is what we sell. We hope you love it!!

This week we will be focusing on the financial aspects of operating a business. Stay tuned!

Classroom Connections

2010-11-16T13:05:00.001-06:00

Hello Readers! The next phase of learning in our classroom is beginning to take shape; the classroom to home connection. Any project or assignment that is given at school will have been introduced and practiced, at the minimum as an entire class, before being sent home. Student responsibility to write assignments in their planner and keep track of due dates becomes increasingly important. During the school week, students get blocks of independent work time to work on current assignments and projects. All assignments are designed for students to complete with minimal support. If your child is having a difficult time with a certain concept or skill, encourage them to ask for some help during independent work time. The following list are important links to online learning extensions of our classroom. If you have any questions or concerns about them, please contact me. Students will be introduced to these websites and tools very soon but you are encouraged to explore them with your child at home.

Math facts are crucial to success in mathematics. Xtra Math is an online portal for children to practice math facts at their own pace. At the end of the fourth grade year, it is expected that all fourth graders are able to demonstrate mastery of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts. This site is a great tool to guide independent practice. You should have seen a flier with login information come home with your child.

Edmodo is a very new kind of learning tool. The idea behind Edmodo is that children will have an online environment to communicate with their teacher and classmates. Online etiquette and learning tools must be taught if students are expected to use them appropriately. This is why Edmodo becomes a valuable tool. Due to privacy and security concerns, our online learning community will only be available and viewable to individuals that are invited to join; this means only students and teachers. Parents will need their child to login in order to see what everything is all about. Student typing speed and skill will be increasingly important if we are to utilize learning tools to their greatest potential. This is where Custom Typing comes into play.

For more information about these learning tools, please visit the sites and read about them. Learning should no longer need to be limited to the traditional classroom environment and is increased when students have multiple opportunities to connect things from school to home and as well as home to school.

Mystery Speaker Program

2010-11-10T13:11:00.000-06:00

I understand in the past there has been a mystery reader program of sorts in many classrooms at Mann. I would like to do a similar classroom extension activity with the help of all our classroom parents. I would like to have a Mystery Speaker program designed to inspire students to write. Fourth grade focuses a lot of effort on improving writing skills with strategies and structured activities. Writing practice and inspiration are two helpful ways to motivate children to improve writing skills. A mystery speaker would be similar to an old fashioned “career day” event where a parent/guardian/adult comes into the classroom to talk with students about their profession, education, life experiences or anything else that you might see fit to motivate children to write. I would also like for speakers to prepare a writing prompt or question that students can respond to immediately following a presentation. Just like your children have very special abilities, skills and experiences to offer our classroom, so too do their parents!

This does not have to be an overly formal undertaking but can be whatever you make it. I am willing to assist with anything you might need to speak/present. The times that work best for our classroom schedule are Mondays from 12:45-1:05pm with writing time to immediately follow from about 1:05-1:25pm. You do not need to stay for the writing time but are welcome to stay. Lectures/presentations do not need to last 20 minutes but should be engaging and thought provoking for fourth grade students. Be creative, exciting, and most of all make it valuable for children! If you enjoy it, the students will too!

If you are interested in taking part in this program to enrich our classroom writing and social studies activities, please pick a date from the list below that works with your schedule. With your help, this program can be a great success! The schedule is a first request basis.

November 29; December 13; January 3, 10; February 7, 14, 28; March 14, 21; April 11, 18, 25; May 2, 9, 16, 23

I am willing to extend this activity to any adult you know that is willing to volunteer!

Student Projects

2010-10-26T12:58:00.001-05:00

The week following parent/teacher/student conferences finds our classroom in an interesting position. After reviewing early student assessments and behaviors, we realize our learning is just beginning. This school year offers plenty of opportunity for students to investigate, collaborate, communicate and create. Students in our classroom are now beginning to work on a couple projects that will allow for connections between home, school and the rest of the world. It's very exciting for all of us to be able to demonstrate thinking and learning in our work!

One of the more exciting projects we are getting involved in this year is called the Global Virtual Classroom contest. This project is designed for students to communicate and collaborate with students from schools around the world to create a website based on a theme. The communication process has already begun as our students are reading and writing with children from a school in Chandler, Arizona and a school in the Russian Federation. Indeed this is an excellent extension project that allows children a chance to learn and practice skills in all disciplines. Click on the "GVC" tab at the top of the blog for more information and relevant links to our project.

Another project that is just starting is called The Sketchbook Project. As an initiative by our Art Appreciation parents, students in from our class will take turns writing and illustrating a continuation story titled "Science Project Gone Wrong". As the sketchbook travels from child to child and home to home, children will be filling pages with original illustrations and writing. When our book is complete it will be submitted to a traveling tour that will eventually make a stop in Chicago! Be sure to ask your child to see our sketchbook when it travels to your home.

The last note for this post will focus on our book buddy partnership with first grade students. Every Friday our fourth graders travel down to a first grade classroom to work with "buddies" on first grade projects that involve a variety of academic and social skills. Each fourth grader is paired up with one or two first graders as a role model. This weekly interaction is great for everyone involved because it allows the "big kids" and "little kids" in our school to make an authentic relationship shaped by academic and social goals. If you haven't talked with your child about their "buddy," ask them soon.

Differently Abled

2010-10-12T12:53:00.000-05:00

Friday of last week all students at Mann School were treated to a very unique assembly with motivational speaker, Lloyd Bachrach. A para-Olympian, Lloyd talked with children about overcoming adversity and achieving dreams with the abilities you have. His story is one that is sure to inspire herds of people across the country and Mann students were so fortunate to witness his different abilities.

His message can be summarized with his five keys to life success. He credits making his dreams come true by following these keys and getting some timely assistance from teachers, coaches, and other significant people in his life. He likes to call these people "dream makers." He certainly was a spectacle to behold. Thanks to the Mann PTO for inviting such a tremendous individual to speak to our students!

1. Have high self-esteem.

2. Have a positive attitude.

3. Set goals for yourself.

4. Persevere - never give up!

5. Take care of your health - mind, body, and spirit.

"The only limitations we have are the ones we place on ourselves." - Lloyd Bachrach

The Prairie and Grove Field Trip

2010-10-03T15:32:00.001-05:00

Friday marked the first field trip of the year for our class. It was a great outdoor excursion through a diverse Illinois Prairie and The Grove, a National Historic Landmark. Most of the day was spent following a docent around and listening to interesting facts about Illinois' biodiversity and ecosystems. A couple highlights included completing a scavenger hunt in a prairie and seeing a gigantic alligator snapping turtle at The Grove. Thanks to our parent volunteer for her chaperoning and photography skills!

Mustang Motto Poster Contest!

2010-09-28T16:56:00.002-05:00

Horse-shoe HOO-RAY! The growing cheer of good behavior at Mann is in it's third year and going stronger that ever. Recently our school PBIS squad launched a "Mustang Motto" poster contest. All classes grade one through five were asked to make posters and select one to represent each class at a grade level vote. Each grade level was then asked to pick one to represent their grade at a school wide contest. Congratulations to all contest entries but a special Horseshoe Hooray goes to the winning fourth grade poster from our classroom! We are all thrilled to have one of our students represent fourth grade with her wonderful artwork. Below is a picture of all poster entries from our classroom. All posters were completed with great effort and creativity but the winning poster for our grade is the one in the bottom left hand corner.

This week we are starting a novel study. The first novel chosen is titled RULES by Cynthia Lord. This book is a one I wanted to share with our class because of some perspectives it offers on a growing up. Keep your eyes and ears peeled for more from this book as we move forward as a class. Children will have different assignments to complete as part of our class literature groups. This first novel study will also be a great way to introduce strong reading strategies and allow students to model and practice them on their own.

Keep checking in and helping out with the home-to-school connection. Your child and I both appreciate it!

Almost There

2010-09-21T12:39:00.000-05:00

This week I was asked to submit my teacher schedule to the district and I was a bit surprised to see what I turned in. After blocking time periods for all the required curriculum subjects, entering specials times, and classroom routines it was alarming how consistent our weekly schedule can be! The first month of school has been anything but consistent because of all the required testing and early evaluation tools mandated for fourth grade. Grade four is a special year in terms of standardized testing because students are required to write an extended response essay and complete a science section during their ISAT in the spring. With MAP Testing finishing this week, a consistent daily schedule will be present itself next week.

Another hiccup in our schedule this week was a visit from the author of The Sixty-Eight Rooms, Marianne Malone. She talked a lot about the writing process and the need to spend ample time editing any piece of writing. Her visit was very inspirational for anyone interested in writing, reading, art or a love of life. She really seems to love what she does and it was presented well for all fourth and fifth graders. Her first book is in bookstores now (like Oak Park's locally owned Magic Tree Books) and is a fiction story about the famous Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago.

The last point for this week's post is the importance of checking your child's student planner daily/nightly. Students can on occasion earn a Horseshoe Hooray for having their planner signed by a parent. More importantly, it's a great practice to get into that connects students with school and home. We fill in planners at the end of every day with activities from the school day and homework assignments. Each child is responsible for their own work and the act of filling in a planner is modeled daily. In addition to planners, many assignments are posted here on my blog. Content areas can be located in the tabs at the top of the page. Soon each content area will have it's own tab and assignments will be posted weekly. All weekly assignments are due no later than Friday and can be completed and turned in before Friday. Please help your child get into healthy academic habits that will promote their individual success.

Thanks for reading and being involved in your child's education!

Still Testing

2010-09-13T16:16:00.001-05:00

As the school year settles down, many routines become ingrained in the minds of students. Some learn quicker than others but more importantly, we all learn. It's helpful to have a daily academic routine. Many people thrive on consistency and predictability while others yearn for new experiences and unexpected challenges. Whatever the personality, our classroom tries to cater them all with a variety of learning experiences, expectations, opportunities, and challenges.

When the sporadic series of first month evaluation testing subsides, regular curriculum schedules can fall into place. In order to complement some of our curricular programs, the fourth grade teachers deem is necessary to offer different kinds of activities, lessons, and worksheets. A pair publications we like to use, especially for Social Studies, is Time For Kids and Scholastic News. Both periodicals have great websites full of current events, young pop culture news, and tons of online activities.

Open-Court Reading is the curriculum guide we use for whole class Basal reading. While we are now reading about one story a week, that will not always be the case. As the year progresses, our class will engage in novel studies and extension lessons. Weeks when we do have an Open-Court story students will be assessed on their story comprehension, vocabulary, and writing analysis skills through a traditional paper and pencil test. These tests are necessary components of fourth grade language arts and will prove helpful in preparation for standardized testing.

The last item for this week's post is a mention of the not-to-far-off field trip to The Grove in Glenview, Illinois. As a National Historic Landmark, The Grove is a wonderful place for students to learn about and explore the biodiversity of Illinois. The changing season is prime time for an educational excursion to a site full of history and wildlife. Check the "Upcoming Events" section on the right hand side of the blog for this trip and other happenings.

Labor Day Week

2010-09-08T12:33:00.000-05:00

The past two days for students have been spent taking a Cognitive Ability Test, called CogAT for short. The test is a measure of thinking ability by students and will be used to help curtail individualized instruction. With a strict testing protocol in place, the exam offered a good opportunity to get familiar with paper and pencil testing procedures in fourth grade. Computer based testing procedures will be taught and practiced next week when fourth graders take the Measure of Academic Progress (MAP) for the first time.

Today, students were given a break from classroom testing to visit the auditorium for a presentation from our Media Specialist and Reading teacher. The two presented the Read to Feed program our school is participating in this year. Each child will receive a packet that details the program and gives necessary information to get started with helping to build stronger communities around the world. Starting the process is simple. All your child has to do is read!

With so many different activities happening in the beginning of the school year, it may be difficult for students to get into a daily and nightly routine. Please help your child by setting aside time after school or at night to read, complete homework assignments, and find enrichment activities. Reading should be as routine for children as it is for adults. Homework assignments should be written in student planners. Enrichment activities can be things your child is working on at home or online activities and websites that focus on specific skills or brain development. All fourth grade teachers at Mann have blogs set up with great links to get your child learning using online tools. If there is a site you or your child has found that is especially engaging, please share it with me and I'll add it to one of my lists.

Product Game

2010-09-01T15:06:00.000-05:00

As promised to my students, here is the link for the product game we played in class today. It is also made available under the math links on the left hand side of the page. Math facts, especially multiplication and division, are hugely important in mathematical success. This game is also great because it brings a little strategery into play. Have fun!

Spelling Words

2010-08-31T15:08:00.000-05:00

Spelling words have been added to the right hand column of the blog. Weekly spelling tests will accompany our classroom readings. If a student gets one hundred percent on the weekly pretest, he/she will get a second "challenge" list to study during the week. Occasional homework assignments may be assigned to help spelling word practice at home. Challenge lists should be used for homework, if applicable.

Fourth grade is a learning process for everyone, including me. If you are unsure about a classroom procedure or having difficulty with communication from your child, please first check their student planner and then contact me. Student responsibility is of the utmost importance in any child's learning experience. I expect each child to take responsibility for their classwork and homework. If an unusual circumstance is effecting your child's ability to complete any assignment, please be sure to let me know. Much more information is available at the Fourth Grade Curriculum night this Thursday, September 2 at 6:00pm in our classroom. I hope to see you all there!

Welcome to a New School Year!

2010-08-24T15:13:00.000-05:00

Fourth grade learning is officially underway with Mr. Reynolds! It's very exciting to see so many familiar faces but equally exciting is the opportunity to meet new students. I am anxious to get going with everything in the new school year and I will start with some new links.

The OP97 main district website is going through a bit of a makeover. With that, many other district pages are being required to get a new appearance for the purpose of a simpler user interface. The new OP97 Library Homepage has an excellent collection of links and access to databases, including a catalog of Mann School's library. There are links to many fourth grade home/school connections like Custom Typing and valuable resource sites. I will also add links like these to my blog.

Mann School is piloting SMART's interactive whiteboards (commonly called a SMART Board) and our classroom is lucky enough to get one. This great learning tool will be used to enhance a variety of curriculum lessons and assist in other student projects. I am still learning the wires, so to speak, with this technology but am eager to adapt my instruction accordingly. If your child is in my classroom, ask them about the starter activity we did today. (Click here to see the result of our morning activity.) All parents will have an up-close look at the board during curriculum night. Just another reason to be sure you are in attendance on Thursday, September 2 at 6:00pm!

Transition Time

2010-08-12T10:47:00.000-05:00

Hello Readers! It has been over a month since my last post and that's because I've had quite a lot going on. As many of you know, I left the country for a month to study in Rome and explore other parts of Italy and Europe. (I am currently sorting through literally thousands of pictures to find the best ones to share.) I returned just over a week ago and am getting my American footing back under me in preparation for the upcoming school year. For me, summer is a great time to spend with family, explore new and old interests, and enjoy taking a break from the demanding formal academic world. But for those of you that really know me, learning never stops and there is always something new to discover!

Just around the corner is a new school year and my role is changing. I will be teaching fourth grade and accepting a more formal responsibility as a technology leader in our school building. Having said that, my blog will be shifting its focus a little bit from the first grade experience to a more general learning experience, with fourth grade focus. Knowing there is a wide variety of viewers scouring this page encourages me to keep many of the good things about it while adding new features. Some of what you find may be helpful for you and some may not. But if I take something away that you like or use, please e-mail me (creynolds@op97.org) and let me know.

Keep your eyes peeled for changes in the blog appearance and be sure to refresh your mind for a new school year with some of the academic links!

Happy Summer!

2010-06-14T08:42:00.000-05:00

Hey Everyone! Hope summer is treating you well so far! My summer travels kicked off with a little road trip through Illinois and Missouri down to Kansas City. It was only a 9 hour drive and I was able to break it in half by visiting some family in St. Louis. Of course, I had to see a baseball game in Kansas City. It was the Royals vs. Detroit Tigers and the Royals won! After the game we were treated to a magic show and fireworks display, kind of like the ones they do at U.S. Cellular Field. Anyway, here is a video slideshow from the final weeks of school. I know the school year is over but our first grade year was one to never forget. Enjoy!

End of the Year Items

2010-05-24T13:02:00.000-05:00

Time together in first grade is rapidly coming to a close. It has been an interesting, but enjoyable journey! We have some exciting days planned the last two weeks of school.

Wednesday, May 26^th - Olympic Day!

Remember to wear your class t-shirt and gym shoes to school. You may also want to bring a water bottle and apply sunscreen before you come to school. The lunch options for Olympic Day will be a hot dog lunch provided to the children by the PTO, school hot lunch, or lunch from home.

Tuesday, June 1^st- House Cleaning

We ask that your child bring a garbage bag to school so that we can do a thorough clean out of our desks and lockers.

Wednesday, June 2^nd - Class Celebration

We invite your child to bring a favorite board game to school. Additionally, your child should bring a handful of their favorite books as we are going to enjoy a read-in/game day together! As an added bonus, the children will have a pizza party snack in the afternoon. Please note this pizza party is not a substitution for a healthy lunch, merely a snack to enjoy together in the afternoon.

Thursday, June 3^rd - Last Day of School

Remember this day is only one hour, 7:55am-8:55am.

I hope you and your children are looking forward to the final days of school. It's hard to believe it's already here, but the summer time awaits us all. Thanks for reading and being involved in the Room 108 experience. See you on the blacktop!

Dream Creatures

2010-05-13T14:22:00.000-05:00

Dream Creatures was the theme for the Eric Carle Project designed and completed with the guidance of our school's media resource teacher. She did an outstanding job with first grade students! She used the creatures of Room 108 students to create a "VoiceThread" slideshow of the finished products. As you will hear in the VoiceThread, students recorded a description of their uniquely named creations. Have a look and listen for yourself.

Pro-Bike Show

2010-05-11T13:36:00.001-05:00

Today students from Room 108 were given an exciting show as Matt Wilhelm, professional BMX flatland trick bikester, visited our school talk about bike safety and many other things. Matt has travelled around the world to compete in BMX bike competitions and has quite a few awards and medals to his name. In addition to bike safety, he talked to children about the importance of identifying and developing individual talents for the sake of earning college scholarships, financial rewards, and life opportunities. By the end of his bike show he had the audience chanting "Never give up!" His message was well-received as he used bike tricks like "time-warp", "decade", and "Spiderman" to demonstrate his personal commitment to practice and never giving up. The whole show was impressive and inspiring. Attached is a short video of Matt using some teachers, myself included, as props to jump with his bike. Luckily I had my iPhone to capture a first hand look at the jump. For more videos of his tricks, head over to his multimedia loaded website.

The whole program was made possible by our school's PTO. They have offered great programs to our students in past years and this event was no exception. Thank you Mann School PTO and all financial supporters of the PTO!

Happy Mother's Day!

2010-05-09T14:18:00.002-05:00

To all the mother's that contribute to the success of Room 108, we salute you! The love, compassion, forgiveness, support, and comfort you offer us is immeasurable and unquantifiable. Thank you moms!

With the end of the school year just around the corner, now is the time for teachers and school staff to find creative organized activities to motivate school children to finish the year strong. One such activity took place this week at school. A.C.E.S. (All Children Exercising Simultaneously) was organized by our physical education teacher and included the entire school doing a variety of dances. Below you will find a couple video highlights of the event. Fifth grade students were asked to be "Dance Leaders" for the younger grades. You will see some of the fifth graders giving their best to show the littler children how to dance. As you'll see, some of the first graders need more leadership than others!

Unit 10 will be starting up this week in Everyday Math and Open-Court Reading. Both of these units will be cumulative reviews of all the skills, concepts, and methods we have learned and practiced over the course of the school year. It's very rewarding to see the way students apply thinking patterns, analysis, and problem solving skills during lessons and assessments now. The past nine months of discipline and hard work really allows students to demonstrate their new knowledge bases. Writing has become a more routine exercise in Room 108 as well. With student vocabularies increased, handwriting improved, and spelling patterns applied, first graders are now starting to shape complete paragraphs full of details. Keep your eyes in those Mail folders for writings and review activities!

The media resource teacher (the position formerly known as librarian) has generated an outstanding literary project themed around the author/illustrator Eric Carle. His creative illustrations and early reader friendly stories like The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Brown Bear, Brown Bear are the inspiration for a project that asks first graders to go through the artist's process to create creatures of their own with stories they make up. Students in Room 108 have gone through the first two steps with the third and final production coming this week. Be sure to check the blog later this week for student work!

Thanks for reading and being involved in the Room 108 learning process. It is together that we help children achieve their best. See you on the blacktop!

District Food Survey

2010-05-06T08:29:00.000-05:00

District 97 is interested in getting your feedback about our food service program. Please visit this link to take a brief 12-question survey regarding a variety of topics, including food variety, overall satisfaction with the program, etc. Even if you and your child do not participate in the school lunch program very often, your input is still desired.

You can also visit the student survey link to read the survey being administered to the students. The deadline for completing the survey is May 13. Any input you can provide regarding ways we can enhance our food service program will be greatly appreciated.

District 97 thanks you for participating!

Busy Week

2010-04-25T21:37:00.001-05:00

The past week was action packed with the daily academic lessons but also plenty of independent, partner and small group work. Mixed in with all of the formal academics were a variety of fun experiences like the Spring Sing, field trip to a nature museum and a bus evacuation drill. At times some of the best learning experiences are never planned, instead they spontaneously evolve from a pattern of learning steps or interpersonal interactions gone awry. However problems present themselves, there's always a chance to analyze and problem solve. It's amazing what six and seven year old minds can think up when the right questions are asked. Anyway, after a week full of [mostly] wonderful new experiences, here is a photo slideshow highlighting our trip to the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago. Enjoy!

The Great Ball Game

2010-04-18T17:18:00.000-05:00

The Great Ball Game was read, prepared, rehearsed and performed last week in Room 108. The story is a play about animals and birds that are having difficulty deciding which group is better, while a confused bat struggles with his identity as either a bird or an animal. The story was a great opportunity for students to practice oral reading and fluency skills. In the pictures, you will see each student made their character out of construction paper and taped them on popsicle sticks to use during the performances. The final picture is a shot of our "Storyteller" sitting next to the day and night scenes that were created collaboratively by all students together.

Unit 8 is over in both reading and math. The new theme for reading is "Being Afraid" and focuses children on stories relating to fear. Students are going to be engaged in constructing story diagrams and charts of all kinds to activate comprehension skills and make story connections. Personal experience and thoughts are going to prove most valuable for children as they discuss selections with their peers throughout the unit. Math is becoming a bit more challenging on a daily basis as the direction of Unit 9 heads into place value and fractions. The number grids (hundred charts) are going to be utilized on a daily basis as a strategy to solidify awareness of place value, for most it will be ones, tens, and hundreds. For others, the sky is the limit as numbers will be explored forwards and backwards, up and down, as well as diagonally. Fractions hopefully become more engrained in children's mind as they use pattern blocks and paper strips to identify equal parts, comparing fractions, and dividing wholes.

Swinging Ahead...

2010-04-11T20:21:00.001-05:00

The upcoming weeks in Room 108 will be full of student projects that demand student thought, preparation, and application, among other skills. Two major projects, in addition to the poetry theme mentioned in the previous post, include the planning and construction of a skyscraper and a travel log students will fill out as they use self-made passports to take virtual trips around the world!

Skyscrapers are a fascination to many around the globe. Living close to Chicago makes these gigantic constructions more than just a ponderance of one's imagination, rather a reality of everyday life. Given the close proximately of architectural feats such as the Willis [Sears], John Hancock, and Trump towers, a project has been started in collaboration with our 4th Grade Buddies, to learn about, design, and construct individual skyscrapers to create a Room 108 Skyline! PBS has a great website about skyscrapers and has served as a support for the planning of this project. I posted a video below with a collection of the world's tallest skyscrapers. Some of the buildings have yet to be constructed completely. Students were asked to use these designs as inspiration and research for the architectural rendering of their own models.

Check back for future posts about student passports, virtual travel around the globe and The Great Ball Game. As part of our social studies learnings about cultures and citizenship, students will spend time exploring different geographical corners of the globe. There's so much out to explore! If you have any suggestions for destinations or kid friendly travel sites, please share in a comment below.

Spring Time in April

2010-04-07T21:22:00.000-05:00

April is poetry month and there is no better way to get into poetry than to read it... and write it! There are plenty of ways to get started with both. Poets like Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky are two household names in Room 108 and their books are available in our school library and the local Oak Park Public Library. Other great authors are out there too! Scholastic has a great poetry website to get you and/or your child exploring the wonderful world of poetry. Keep your eyes open for student poetry and poems!

Spirit Week

2010-03-21T16:55:00.007-05:00

With all the excitement about the upcoming spring break, it only makes sense to channel some of that enthusiasm into daily school routines. This week is a student council sponsored Spirit Week infused with themed days encouraging students at all grade levels to wear fashioned clothing and styled appearances. Get ready for a wild week of energy and creativity! (Schedule for Spirit Week is on the right hand of the blog.)

Speaking of creativity, the recent St. Paddy's Day event in our classroom dealt with six and seven year olds trying to capture leprechaun's with their homemade Leprechaun Traps. The minds of first graders work in mysterious ways and their perspective on the world is startling unique and creative. Students were given the opportunity to share their trapping gadgets with kindergarteners and first graders, all St. Patrick's Day long.

(The whole class with their leprechaun traps.)

Room 108 was recently transformed into a temporary art studio once again for Art Appreciation. This time around the artist in focus was Giuseppe Arcimboldo. As an Italian artist, Arcimboldo created vivid works of mannerism using various living earthly creations like fruits, vegetables, animals, and the like. Using fruits and vegetable cut-outs as the paint, students created creatures of their own with unique interpretations of the world. To understand, you must simple watch the picture slideshow below.

Looking ahead, Unit 8 provides a spotlight on story reading and comprehension with greater emphasis on story understanding and strategies such as visualize, predict, connect, sequence, and conclude. You may have noticed a comprehension assessment in your child's Mail folder last week. All of these "tests" are completed as a whole class activity right now and will progress to small group and individual assignments as student abilities allow.

Mathematics is continuing to progress with focus on more abstract, and usually challenging topics, like MENTAL arithmetic, money (including making change), and fractions. All of these concepts will provide children with opportunities to manipulate numbers, strategies, and concepts with physical objects, save mental math of course. It should be quite a challenge to force all children to "do math" without the assistance of a number line, hundreds chart, calculator or even their fingers!

As this may be the last post many of you read before Spring Break, I want to thank you for your continued commitment to the first grade experience and wish you a relaxing, rejuvenating, and refreshing time away from the academic structure of school. But remember, just because you are outside of the walls of the school, doesn't mean learning has to stop. There is something new and interesting to learn every day... you just have to find it!

Feeling Green

2010-03-14T16:17:00.002-05:00

I've learned in Chicagoland that St. Patrick's Day is not merely one day for Irish blooded people to wear green, eat corned beef and soda bread, and pass out the "Luck o' the Irish" but instead appears to me as a celebration for everyone, that lasts at least a week, if not more. After coming to this realization, I have no choice but to include the holiday's buzz to fuel some classroom learning. (Have a click here for some online St. Patty's games.) With an extensive variety of creative and original leprechaun traps lining our classroom, no little green Irish creatures should feel safe in Room 108. If there is any gold anywhere, students will be sure to find it!

Bloxorz is a block-flipping, strategy game that fits very nicely into our current "shapes" unit of Everyday Math. CoolMath4Kids.com is the host site with online games, activities and lessons designed for children ages 3-12 (according to the website) and has some great games for enriching concepts and skills students learn and practice in Room 108. Some of the games take concepts to a much deeper level. If you have a child interested in diving deeper, please help them learn a new game or two so they can continue on their personalized learning journey. Shapes will continue to be a presence in Room 108 for the rest of the school year so keep those reusable and recyclable examples from home moving into our classroom. We have some architectural design and construction to work on after spring break.

There is only one Shel Silverstein, but when you have read and re-read all of his work, there has to be another poet out there worth sharing... enter Jack Prelutsky. His works of prose, rhymes and illustrations are very quarky, clever and at times, downright random. Having said that, his poetry has been introduced to children in Room 108 as a progression of readings during classroom snack time. (Also getting mixed into snack time are the ever-popular Tumblebooks and curriculum videos from United Streaming.)

Looking ahead, it is merely two full weeks of school until District 97's spring break. Looks like just enough time to review and close out Unit 7 in reading and math before springing right into Unit 8 in both subjects. Thanks for all the outstanding support from home. See you on the blacktop!

Special Visit

2010-03-09T06:37:00.006-06:00

Sometimes with six and seven year olds it can be difficult to ascertain just how much responsibility is shown for their own learning. But there was a special guest that stopped by Room 108 on Monday, and she got a first hand look at students taking ownership for their learning. Dr. Collins, Superintendent of District 97, made a surprise visit to Room 108 to see first-hand what kind of learning is taking place and I must say, the children were hard at work, just like every other day.

Students had just finished up morning journaling and had some time to decide what kind of language arts activities they wanted to work on. Each child is responsible for choosing what they engage themselves in next. It is the case, because they are still first graders, some need a little guidance in their selection process, but it still ultimately comes from their choice. It's a wonderful scene when 20 or so first graders are engaged in something they chose to work on.

Once she noticed some of the children were reading, she immediately wanted a couple children to read with her. The picture is Dr. Collins reading with a student in Room 108. All-in-all it was a great visit, and a nice moment of reflection for the kinds of things happening in our classroom on a daily basis.

Horseshoe Hooray!

2010-03-01T15:10:00.005-06:00

Happy Casimir Pulaski Day! In honor of this historic war-time figure, public schools in the state of Illinois observe this day by not going to school. The final week of February brought what seemed to be a few days of hard work capped off by a couple days to participate in some different kinds of learning experiences and celebrate a month of positive behavior.

Thursday was titled "Hats Off to Good Behavior" and children to were allowed to wear hats in school all day, along with "Mann-Wear." Children also had the chance to win prizes for their great behavior if they're name was on one of the lucky "Horseshoe Hooray" slips drawn from the classroom bucket.

It was also a day for students in Room 108 to prepare for "Game Day" with the whole academic school day being dedicated to reviewing concepts and skills in language arts and math. The school day closed with a literature circle, led by our the media resource teacher (librarian), with a book titled Henry's Freedom Box. To enrich the book, children were all given a chance to climb inside a cardboard box to get an idea of what it would be like to mail yourself in a box.

With the end of one unit, comes the start of the next. Here is a little information to get you anticipating what students in ROom 108 will be learning in our next unit in math and language arts.

Reading has elevated the expectations for all students by giving each child an anthology book loaded with stories based on unit themes. Unit 7 is themed "Keep Trying" with stories focused on lessons of failure and success. Now reading comprehension strategies are of the utmost importance as we focus on the development of characters, sequence of events, and making connections with what we read.

Math is shifting its focus as well into shapes of all kinds. We will be working with two and three dimensional shapes with words like prisms, attributes, and polygons becoming more commonplace. We will be constructing a "shapes museum" so keep your ears open for the details surrounding your child's learning. Students will also be reviewing previous learned concepts with daily review workbook pages and exploration activities.

With all the excitement and extra-fun activities, it might be a bit of a challenge for students to come back to school to dive into a new unit of learning. That's one of the great things about school, each day is a chance to learn something new!

Current Links

2010-02-18T09:04:00.004-06:00

Here is a collection of links that are being posted to let kids explore during our class computer lab time.

A Pictorial History of US Currency, created by Mint.com, displays twenty-three different pieces of US currency from throughout the history of the United States. We have been practicing a lot of coin counting again in the classroom and this link is an interesting one to show children how American money has changed over the years.

Math Run is a simple and fun game for practicing math skills. Math Run presents players with a scrolling series of mathematics problems. The players respond to each problem by using the right and left arrow keys on their keyboards. I like this simple fact game because it calculates "brain speed" at the top. How fast can your brain think?

Feed Fribbit Addition and Feed Fribbit Subtraction are more "child-friendly" fact games. These match better with Everyday Math facts because every once in awhile the user needs to select the missing number and is not always asked for the sum or difference to a problem. Fact families have been commonplace in the classroom over the last two weeks and this game supports that line of thinking.

Sticking with arguably the most popular sport trend in the classroom this week is a Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics webpage. This page is part of the "official" winter Olympics website and introduces children to the Olympic mascots and dreams behind being an olympian.

Hope you enjoy the links! Happy browsing and GO USA!

A Valentine Recap

2010-02-15T13:51:00.005-06:00

A whirlwind of a Valentine week left plenty of need for a day off from school in observation of Presidents' Day. The past week in Room 108 saw an Art Appreciation session that introduced children to pop art sensation Andy Warhol. (Hopefully all the parents out there were surprised with a pop art creation from your young artist.) Finally, the week was capped off with a highly anticipated harmonica concert and enthusiastic Valentine's Day party! The video you see below are of the Room 108 students performing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." Pictures from all the above mentioned events can be found in the slideshow on the right hand side of the blog.

Halftime

2010-02-07T15:19:00.002-06:00

Let me begin by first thanking everyone involved in the Room 108 first grade experience. Thank you parents for your attendance and valuable input and feedback regarding your child and their academic, social, emotional and behavioral development in the first half of this year. It is the team effort that has created the collaboration and support necessary to provide the best educational opportunities for all children to learn.

Looking ahead to unit 6 in both Open-Court Reading and Everyday Math brings a host of new skills and concepts but also a review and application of skills acquired in previous units. Unit 6 in reading is titled Journeys and uses stories about travel to enhance comprehension strategies like summarizing, making predictions, and making connections. Students will also be exposed to new vocabulary terms through reading about journeys like that of Captain Bill Pinkney.

Unit 6 for Everyday Math continues with a constant diet of addition facts, presented with a variety of manipulatives. Fact families should become a common term as students use these groups of three numbers to practice addition and subtraction relationships between numbers. Time-telling will resurface along with some measuring skills and continued practice with the hundreds chart.

Be sure to keep your calendars up to date with the upcoming events for Room 108 and keep up the good work with the homework. This week should be a great one with a big harmonica concert and Valentine's Day celebration. Hope to see you there!

It's Still Winter

2010-01-25T13:53:00.002-06:00

Although warm weather melted some of this winter's snow blanket, the cold has returned and with it, the reality of winter. Timing for the drastic weather changes has been fitting for our Open-Court whole class readings and discussions on our current unit topic Weather. Unfortunately, timing orchestrated with the recent tragedy in Haiti, caused by one of the most extreme of all natural disasters, an earthquake. Haiti's tragedy has stirred tremendous conversation about tragedy and relief, while also creating awareness of our privilege and fortune in our local school community. If you have not already talked with your child about the catastrophe in the Caribbean, please do so. There are a number of different ways to offer relief for those who have suffered, for opportunities click here, or run a quick Google search for 'Haiti Relief'.

Weather has been an interesting topic to explore as children have a variety of personal experiences to offer in connection to our readings. As students share knowledge and connections, they are demonstrating understanding and application from what they read, to what they know. To extend the weather topic with geography and map reading skills, students were taken to the computer lab where each child logged onto The Weather Channel's sponsored website, weather.com, to analyze and interpret different kinds of weather maps, including the most common tell-tale of precipitation, Doppler radar. Ask your child to give you a little overview if you are curious. See what they learned!

Room 108 will soon be participating in a Box Tops 4 Education fundraiser project sponsored by the Mann Student Council. For the entire month of February, each classroom in the school is encouraged to collect 'Box Tops' from commonly purchased household items and bring them into their classroom's collection box. The class with the most box tops for the month will win a class party! Helps our class earn as many as possible by starting a collection immediately at home and sending them to school with your child. For a complete list, visit the Box Tops website, or just click here. (While you're at it, could you send any paper towel or toilet paper tubes, too please? It's for an upcoming project.)

This Thursday, January 28 marks our monthly All School Celebration of positive behavior modeled through the Mustang Motto. Be sure to have your child 'decked out' in their 'Mann Wear' and refreshed on the three parts of our motto. Conferences are also just around the corner. Hopefully, you have your time scheduled and are ready to get some detailed information (data, if you will) about your child's individual progress in their first grade experience. The upcoming Game Day on Friday, January 29th will serve as a timely assessment day prior to conference week. If your child has been coming to school daily, working hard, and trying their best, they will be plenty prepared for anything a Game Day has to offer. (Completing homework is also sure to be helpful when performing in school.)

If you made it this far, THANKS FOR READING (and feel free to make a comment or at least click a check box.) This school year is zipping by and student growth is really starting to expose itself in all kinds of unique ways! See you on the blacktop!

Harmonica 101

2010-01-12T23:01:00.003-06:00

Here are some pictures from our first harmonica class with John Milan. The local Oak Park artist has been teaching drums and harmonica in the area for over 30 years. His expertise will help guide first graders in their harmonica playing experience. Our next session is this Friday, January 15. Be sure to ask your child about their reaction to this learning experience!

(Photos courtesy of Patti Quilling, a representative of the Oak Park Education Foundation's Art Start program.)

Back At It Again In 2010

2010-01-10T13:58:00.005-06:00

The first week back from winter break was a great success! Students were quick to remember their daily routines and just as eager to get back to working hard with everything. From our morning journal and phonics, to reading and math, and through writing and spelling words, children from Room 108 were positive, cooperative, and showed great signs of responsibility and respect. With all the excellent performance and effort, children earned plenty of independent work time and even a couple whole class recesses!

To celebrate the New Year, many cities have elaborate firework displays. Here is one that stuck out in my mind from the Fourth of July last year. I know it's not a New Year's Eve display but I think it's an outstanding display nonetheless. Happy New Year!!

Macy's Fourth of July Fireworks in New York City: Canon 5D mark II from Mike Kobal on Vimeo.

Friday marked the beginning of Room 108's Art Start experience with local musical professional, John Milan. He is teaching all Mann first graders to play the harmonica. "John," as he prefers the children to call him, will teach six sessions on consecutive Fridays with each session lasting approximately 50 minutes. Our first session covered the basics of playing the instrument and had the class play simple tunes like "London Bridge" and "Twinkle, Twinkle." John really motivated the kids with his opening rendition of the Star Wars theme song! Check back next week for more info and pictures from Harmonica 101. Many thanks to the Oak Park Education Foundation for funding the Art Start program and making these unique opportunities available to our students.

Homework packets went home on Friday as well. Homework packets will be sent home every Friday from now until spring break. Each packet is due by the following Friday, at the latest. Packets can be turned in as soon as they are completed. The idea of the packet is to provide some extra work for your child at home to strengthen skills taught at school, extend thinking, and provide some enrichment in a variety of content areas. If you have any questions about the packet or your child has misplaced it, e-mail me.

Room 108 has a full five day week ahead with another list of spelling words and all our specials. We will honor Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday on Friday with some activities and schools will be closed on Monday, January 18. That's all for now. With warmer weather this week, students should be lining up outside in the mornings. Hope to see you on the blacktop!

A New Year, New Things to Learn

2010-01-03T19:34:00.003-06:00

Happy 2010!! Hopefully the new year brings plenty of opportunity for for new learning experiences and excitement for you and your family! 2009 was a great year for students in Room 108 going back to students from the spring and continuing on with a new group of first graders in the fall. Learning can be designed in a very organized and structured pattern for children but the children and their personalities are always unpredictable. As we look ahead to the second half of the first grade experience, expectations are heightened for student responsibility, behavior, and performance. Remember, success is relative to individual needs and measured by effort.

Unit 5 will be underway in both Everyday Math and Open Court Reading. New math concepts will focus on place value, number problems, as well as "easy" math facts and double digit addition. Other math skills will be frequently reviewed in a variety of methods such as games, worksheets, workbook pages and mental math. The Family HomeLink Letter for Unit 5 (and all future and past units) can be found here. The next unit in Open-Court Reading is titled Weather and will storm through a variety of stories aimed at enhancing knowledge and awareness of weather. Specific reading skills for the unit will include making predictions, cause and effect, summarizing, and making inferences. Some of you might want some additional resources for the unit or a refresher on some of the basic sight words, both can use this site as a starting point.

Most of this week will also include plenty of "refresher" activities like community circle, calendar, and of course our morning routine. The idea is to get back into the swing of things in Room 108 and at Mann School. There will be spelling words for the week and they will be available on the blog Monday after school. I hope you are all ready to get back into the school routine and had a blessed and restful winter break. In parting, I will leave you with a photo slideshow of pictures I took during the Zoolights Festival at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. I'm interested to know if any of you took your family, or any other loved ones, to this light festival or the one at the Brookfield Zoo. Please comment below to share!

(Music is courtesy of Mannheim Steamroller.)

Happy Holidays!

2009-12-14T19:09:00.005-06:00

Season's Greetings from everyone in Room 108! Consider this our winter check-in and a thank you for everything you all do to help us learn and grow together. This shot was taken before we took a trip to see the Nutcracker Ballet. The boys and girls were all very dapper and on their best behavior to witness and incredible rendition of one of the most timeless holiday ballets.

This week will be a kind of holiday celebration with lots of seasonal activities and independent, partner, small group, and whole class activities. Tuesday, December 15 will be the Mann All-School celebration for positive behavior in December. All students in the school will celebrate by playing board games for awhile in the afternoon. Children and staff will be decked out in Mann-Wear and have their favorite board games to share with their friends.

Hope to see many of you at our winter party on Wednesday, December 16 to revel in the season's spirit and excitement before our long winter break!

Winter Time

2009-12-06T10:16:00.004-06:00

Brrrrr! There's no looking back now. The blustery winds have started blowing and the first snow has fallen. Although nothing has accumulated yet, the cold feeling of winter has set in. You can help ensure your child is prepared for cold weather recess by sending them to school with a winter coat, gloves, stocking hat and any other winter clothing you want. When the snow sticks around, you'll want to be sure to outfit your munchkin in snow pants and boots, along with the normal winter garb. Snow and ice also mean wetness so its a good idea to send an extra pair of socks for your child to keep in their locker. Please help out by making sure your child is bundled appropriately for the winter weather! (It would also be a great idea to teach your little one the responsibility of bundling up on their own. I will of course be there to make sure everything is ship-shape.)

This Wednesday, December 9 students will be attending a Ballet Legere performance of Peter Tchaikovksy's Nutcracker Ballet at the Chodl Theatre located in Cicero. This is a wonderful opportunity for children to see one of the most famous holiday classics. It's also a terrific way to incorporate manners and etiquette into our every day lives. For the performance, children are asked to "dress up" by wearing ballet appropriate attire. Please reinforce with your child the importance of manners and etiquette as we will be learning about them this week. Here is a little preview of the "Russian Dance" from Nutcracker ballet. The music is infamously recognizable and forever timeless.

This time of year seems to always become very busy with all kinds of holiday hubbub and seasonal changes and decorations. Student in Room 108 will be reading, writing and learning about many of the more common holiday celebrations while being encouraged to respect the traditions and beliefs of other people and cultures. One of the most important aspects of this season is showing compassion for others and respecting traditions other families observe. Hopefully you can find time to discuss meanings of the holiday season with your child and help them understand how fortunate they are to have such wonderful opportunities as an American child.

Thanks for reading, dress warmly, and I will see you on the blacktop!

Gobble, Gobble

2009-11-22T14:03:00.002-06:00

After a very eventful five days of learning and experience, Thanksgiving week is upon us and that means only two days of school this week for Room 108. Monday will function like a regular academic school day, with our usual schedule of learning routines capped off by a festive activity with our fourth grade buddies. Tuesday will be more of a Thanksgiving infused academic day with an emphasis on social learning and group work.

Students in Room 108 have been working with our fourth grade buddies every Monday for quite awhile now and most of our activities have been inspired by holidays or seasonal awareness. Fourth graders are helpful in a variety of ways. The expectation for fourth graders is that they will model positive "Mustang Motto" behavior, assist first graders with reading and writing, while also encouraging hard work and effort. Many first graders have had one or two buddies for most of the year but partnerships will get shuffled around as the school year continues.

Speaking of the "Mustang Motto," Tuesday will be the all-school celebration for positive behavior. The entire school will celebrate another month of outstanding behavior by doing the "Cha-Cha Slide." To help get into our school spirit children and staff are asked to sport "Mann Wear" to school.

With a short week there will be no spelling words or library checkout time. If you want new library books, or forgot to return books last week, your child can bring them in on Monday or Tuesday to get some new ones for the long weekend. Children will also have a Thanksgiving Fun Packet to work on over the break. This packet is not required to be completed or returned to school, it is just something fun to work and a simple way to keep thinking skills sharp over the turkey break.

For those of you traveling this holiday, I hope your travels are smooth and safe. No matter what your Turkey Day plans, I hope they are full of family, friends and plenty of food. I think we all have plenty to be thankful for and I hope everyone shares their grateful thoughts with those closest to you. I am especially thankful for everyone involved in the first grade experience and all the outstanding support in the learning process. Thanks for reading and Happy Thanksgiving!

Spelling Counts

2009-11-15T16:52:00.002-06:00

It's almost like when one holiday is over, the next is right around the corner. Can you hear the gobble of the turkeys? Can you smell the fresh baked pie? Do you taste the stuffing yet? Thanksgiving is fast approaching and the seasonal changes that come with it have been long underway. Students in Room 108 have been asked to use a variety of their senses and thinking skills to connect to the variety of aspects this wonderful holiday offers. From a book and biographical writing of Sarah Hale, to the step-by-step process of how to draw a turkey, Thanksgiving is a theme we will be gobbling up until the feast is upon us!

All the turkey talk is in addition to the standardized curriculum infused into our daily routine. Open Court reading is now in Unit 4 titled "Our Neighborhood at Work" and focuses on a the vast assortment of jobs, careers, and workers in our surrounding community. Major reading skills will include making connections, comprehension, drawing inferences, and comparing/contrasting. This unit matches nicely with our current social studies unit about our community. Children will be analyzing not only vocations and people of our community but also the physical characteristics of our neighborhood.

Everyday Math is now progressing into new concepts of measurement. Measuring will require new tools like thermometers and rulers, in addition to non-standard (human adapted) units of measurement like a digit, hand width or fathom. Students will continue to practice concepts like frames and arrows and number sequence while taking other skills to a deeper level, like telling time and coin counting. This section of Everyday Math matches nicely with our science topic of Solids and Liquids (formerly Properties of Matter) as students will soon be asked to distinguish and match traits of objects based on characteristics such as size, shape, and color.

Spelling words will be added as part of the writing process this week. Word patterns and spellings will match very closely to daily and weekly phonics skills and literature exposure. The spelling list will be posted on the right hand side of the blog starting on Mondays after school.

In parting, I will leave you with a very general and manageable Thanksgiving link from Scholastic. I don't know about you but I feel like I've learn something new about each holiday every year. I guess that comes with the territory. Thanks for reading and I'll see you on the blacktop!

A Halloween Montage

2009-11-08T17:22:00.004-06:00

An observation of Veteran's Day granted us an extended weekend and the next two and half weeks will be include the next level of growth leading up to the end of the first trimester, and Thanksgiving break. Game Day for Unit 3 will happen this Tuesday, November 10 with Unit 4 in reading and math beginning the next day. I understand there have been some students that have missed multiple days of school but everyone has done a great job keeping up with missed work. Thank you parents for taking such strong initiative in keeping your child connected with classroom content!

Thanks to those of you that sent pictures in from the Halloween celebration and art appreciation. You will be able to see some shots from Room 108 in the slideshow on the right hand sidebar. I created a simple video montage video using iMovie. The song choice was inspired by the recent theatre release of the Michael Jackson movie This Is It. I had a chance to see the movie and it was inspiring in the sense that Michael Jackson really was a tremendously talented entertainer who nearly perfected the art of performance. Thriller also has an eerily familiar Halloween feel. Enjoy!

Is It November Already?

2009-11-01T17:11:00.002-06:00

Rain, rain go away and come again another day! If you don't we don't care, we'll just move our Halloween parade inside and still have a great time! Thank you everyone that came out for the Room 108 Halloween Celebration and for adapting with us to have the All-School Parade indoors. The costumes were classic, creative and some a bit spooky but what was clear was the energy and enjoyment beaming from students (and even some parents!) Hopefully the excitement continued through the holiday weekend for you all and will help carry us through the short, four-day week.

Looking ahead to the week, Unit 3 in Everyday Math and Open Court Reading will wrap up with the introduction of a few new skills and some review, before culminating in a Game Day on Tuesday, November 10. Math will include time telling to the half hour, introduction of the dime, continued coin counting practice, and number grid counting. Phonics skills will continue to focus on digraphs; two letter combinations that make one sound, like ch-, th-, sh-, ar, er, ir. Reading strategies will focus on summarizing, visualizing, and making connections.

Science and social studies will continue to alternate days and weeks. Science will still use organisms as a basis for observations, inference, and sorting skills while we continue to learn about the subject of science and it's embedded nature throughout the world around us. Social studies will keep on with geography skills like reading cardinal directions, using map keys, and following directions. We will also begin reading out of the Unit 2 big book titled, "Our Community."

In closing this week I will leave you with a link to the time telling game students played in the computer lab last week. The game is called "STOP THE CLOCK" and children need to match digital clocks to analog clock times to stop the clock in the quickest amount of time possible. We were working on telling time to the half hour, but if your child has a firm grasp of the half hour, your might challenge them with clocks to the quarter hours. This link, and more new links, are available under the "Math Maniac Links" section on the right hand side of the blog.

Things That Go, And Go, And Go!

2009-10-25T18:01:00.004-05:00

Chugga, Chugga Choo, Choo!! The Room 108 Team keeps on the train through the end of October and whirlwind of action happening all around us! Last week was a busy one with conferences, book fair, and two half days of school. On Friday, many students participated in the New Era sponsored Wear Your Cap to School Day that raised money for the Caps For Kids foundation. Also on Friday we were all treated to an Art Appreciation lesson on Alexander "Sandy" Calder. The children were shown some superior pieces of Sandy's work and focused on his most popular creation, the mobile. Students were then given an opportunity to build their own fall inspired mobiles with sticks and leaves from trees, along with many other building items such as paper clips, pipe cleaners, and chop sticks.

Thanks to all the parents for all you did this week! Parent/teacher conferences ran very smoothly because of the punctuality and participation from those of you that were able to make it. The book fair was also a great success and students were thrilled to share book purchases with all their classmates! The art appreciation moms did an excellent job in promoting the work of Sandy Calder and helping children make inspired and very original mobiles!

This Friday, October 30th is another great chance to get involved in the classroom because we are having a Halloween Celebration! In addition, Mann is having an All-School Halloween Parade! It should be quite the costuming masquerade! Parents are encouraged to help out with the classroom party and attend the parade around the school block.

Unit 3 Underway

2009-10-15T08:53:00.002-05:00

Hey Readers! With parent teacher conferences just around the corner, Unit 2 has been completed and Unit 3 in reading and math is underway. The challenge with the early months of first grade is that no one skill is taught to mastery meaning skills are merely introduced or reviewed before new concepts and skills are introduced again. Just about every concept, skill, strategy, and procedure in math and language arts is a foundational skill by which students will build further thinking, understanding, and application.

If you have been checking in on your child's Mail folder you should see the (almost daily) math home links and decodable books. When a new unit begins, there is a unit overview from Everyday Math that is sent home and it has no homework attached to it. That overview is for grown-ups to have an idea of the concepts and skills that will be introduced and worked on in the next unit. Some days flow more smoothly than others and in some cases, math gets squeezed at the end of the day and home links are a great way for your child to connect what they did cover in school with you at home. The same goes for decodable books, some days we focus on specific phonetic skills with other days being treated as review days. Typically what you see in your child's Mail folder is a snapshot of topics, concepts, skills and/or activities that took place that day. If you see nothing in their folder, that means most of the day involved whole class lessons with workbook and collected forms of assessment.

Keep your schedules up to date with the Upcoming Events section in the right hand column and thanks for sending your children to school with such great looking outfits and smiles for picture day! See you on the blacktop!

Walk to School Week

2009-10-04T20:46:00.002-05:00

Hey Everyone! This week is Walk to School Week at Mann! This is a great chance for children to learn about the importance of conservation, waste-reduction, and well-being practices. Along with activities in the classroom and special area classes, students are encouraged to walk and bike (and scooter) to school to help eliminate using vehicles, which use nonrenewable resources to operate and put pollutants into the air. Below is a list of colors and themes for each day of the week. Be sure to encourage your child's participation in this great week! It may be a challenge for some but your effort in immeasurably appreciated (by humans and the Earth.)

Monday, October 5^th: Students (and staff if they want to!) wear red for transportation safety and receive a hand stamp for walking to school.

Tuesday, October 6^th: Students wear blue for water conservation and receive a book mark for walking to school.

Wednesday, October 7^th (the official international walk to school day): Students wear green for the earth, come to school in “walking school buses” and receive a treat from Active Transportation Alliance and Whole Foods. At lunch time a 6’ evergreen tree will be planted behind the school by Hoy Landscaping. The students can watch the planting process during recess.

Thursday, October 8^th: Students wear yellow for energy conservation and receive Mann Moolah for smoothies. At lunch time students will be rewarded with a hand stamp for bringing a zero waste lunch to school (using all recyclable containers with nothing ending up in a landfill).

Friday, October 9^th: Students wear their favorite sports team for physical activity and receive a reusable container with a treat inside for walking to school. These containers are to be taken home for reuse and should not be thrown away!

“Walking School Buses” will also happen on Wednesday, October 14, 21 and 28

Thanks to the Parents of Mann School for putting all of this together!!!

Four-Square Writing

2009-09-27T17:43:00.004-05:00

The four-square writing method can be used at almost every elementary level and can even be creatively adapted for middle school or high school writers. For first grade it helps to model writing at it's most basic level; combining words to make a sentence. With the fall season here, and weather as one of our science topics, students in Room 108 brainstormed together around the "fall" topic. Below are two examples of student work from our four-square writing activity. The front side is the brainstorm activity, done as a class. The topic "fall" is in the circle with the four squares identifying how fall looks, feels, smells, and things they like to do.

The second image is the reverse side of the four-square, which is completed independently. Each box is numbered on both sides so children know which box they are writing in when they are flipping back and forth. Each square on the reverse challenges students to piece together the words from the brainstorm into complete sentences with a capital letter and punctuation mark. For the "fall" topic, three of the four sentences begin with the word fall. When a sentence is complete, children are then to draw a picture that illustrates the sentence for the box.

The two images combine for a great example of a finished product from a four-square writing lesson. The two pictures are from two different students and show that students are not creating the same four sentences. The whole class brainstorm offers student to pick words and create sentences unique to their interpretation of the topic. In this case you can see that in square number four, one student likes to jump into leaf piles in the fall while the other likes to ride bike in the fall. Four-square writing requires an extended amount of student focus, effort, critical thinking and creativity about a topic. The fall four-square writing was a great success!

Falling Into Unit 2

2009-09-20T21:25:00.003-05:00

Autumn is here which means the end of September and the start of colder weather is right around the corner. We have been pretty lucky over the last couple weeks of summer to have plenty of sunshine and gently cooling breezes to make the outdoors plenty inviting. As the new season grows on us in Room 108, students are developing skills of individual responsibility and learning to work hard. It's been quite rewarding to see how much progress has taken place for students in the still very young school year!

Open-Court Reading has Unit 2 titled Animals and focuses stories on a variety of animals, families and activities. Reading strategies students will be practicing are visualizing and predicting. Both strategies are important skills for engaging in stories and encouraging children to form thoughts and pictures in their minds. Phonics skills include initial and ending letter sounds of words, short vowel sounds, and blending (decoding) unfamiliar words. Writing skills like spelling, sentence structure, capitalization and punctuation are being introduced in as many ways as possible. Journaling will serve as the students greatest opportunity to explore writing in their own way. More structured writing lessons will model writing and offer focused approaches to writers' skills.

Everyday Math pushes ahead with the continuation of skills covered in unit one and introduces new concepts such as analog clocks (telling time to the hour and half hour), complements of 10 (an early concrete addition skill), number sequence, and using the number grid as a tool. If you are keeping up with math homelinks you will see many of these skills being reviewed often.

After one and a half (long) days (trapped in one room with 29 other first grade teachers) of science curriculum training courtesy of District 97 and our new publishing companies, Houghton Mifflin and Carolina's STC, science topics are finalized and will be brought into the classroom very soon. For more info on either publisher click on their name. The first grade units are Weather, Solids & Liquids, and Organisms. The units over lap each other and complement many of the other curricular pieces in a variety of ways. When we start science lessons in the classroom you should see letters and artifacts in your child's Mail folder.

More to come! Until then, I hope to see you soon on the blacktop!

End of Unit = Game Day

2009-09-13T19:20:00.002-05:00

Greetings Readers. As the brink of the fourth week in the new school arrives, the end of the first units in language arts and math follows close behind. Everyday Math and Open-Court Reading curriculums offer a nice mapping of units with lessons that can be planned in such a way that culminating assessments can be delivered on the same day. I coined the term "Game Day" for students in Room 108 to encourage enthusiasm for high performance and hopefully alleviate, an early age, many of the pressures that seem to surround standardized testing in higher grades. Over the past couple years I have used these assessment days as a way to practice test taking skills and procedures at the first grade level. As long as your child is coming to school daily, participating in whole class activities and giving their best effort, they will be prepared for assessments. What you can do to help ensure your child is über-prepared for "Game Day" is make sure your child eats a hearty dinner, does some (at least 10-15 minutes) reading before bed time, and gets plenty of sleep. The morning of Game Day, ensure your child has a well balanced breakfast and their Mail folder and snack loaded in their backpack. These tasks may seem simple and routine for some but assist in preparing your child for a great day of thinking and performance at school. Assessments will be used as formalized evaluations of student ability, focus, skills, and effort. Parents can see assessments during parent/teacher conferences in October. The first Game Day will be this Tuesday, September 15.

Thanks to everybody that ordered books through Scholastic. Books should arrive late this week or early next week. Your purchases help to support our classroom library and increase resources available to ALL students in Room 108. Another great way to motivate reading at home is to utilize online reading resources. One of the most popular resources for Room 108 students in the past are Tumblebooks. Tumblebooks are like karaoke for children's books. Ha! That's the best short description I can offer. Check them out by following the link, click on "Tumblebooks at the New York Public Library" and then click "Story Books." There is a wide array of book topics and reading levels with many books offering games and activities to check comprehension and promote deeper reading insight. The link is permanently available on the right hand column of the blog.

In parting, I leave you with an interesting time lapse video I found when exploring technology and media literacy for elementary students. Other than being fascinated by the video, I hope it provides entertainment for you (and your child might like it too) with a realization that life can be viewed differently when given someone else's perspective. We have talked quite a bit about people and the world in our first unit of social studies titled "People Everywhere." This video reminds me of how small humans really are when compared against the gigantic expanses of the world's natural features. (I'm also becoming very interested in video and photography so if ANY OF YOU have any skill or knowledge about cameras, film and/or photography, please let me know. I'm just an amateur.)

Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Moving On...

2009-09-07T13:44:00.002-05:00

Happy Labor Day everyone! With two weeks of school in the proverbial record books, I hope you all had the opportunity to spend this long weekend relaxing and enjoying time with those closest to you. The first two weeks provided students a great introduction into first grade, chances to makes new connections and learn about their teacher, classmates, and classroom we will be learning in all year long. Hopefully the transformation into a new school year is winding down as we gear up and look ahead into the great expanse known as the first grade experience.

With the Room 108 Team assembled, classroom rules posted, a management plan in place, more than a week of practice under our belts, and a thorough review of early first grade skills underway, the responsibility for learning is starting to be shared amongst teacher, student and family. Responsibility is one of the three monickers that make up the Mustang Motto (Be respectful. Be responsible. Be compassionate.) and is especially important when it comes to learning. Lots of early conversation with students focus on goals and reasons for learning things in school. One of the great thing about first grade is that children are learning all kinds of skills that will be important for success throughout the rest of their life!

Tuesday of this week students in Room 108, and all over the nation, are invited to watch the president of the United States deliver a message to them (students) about the importance of education, goal setting, and working hard. This will be the first time since 1991 that the American President will deliver such a message. The broadcast will be available for viewing on C-SPAN and online for streaming via the White House website. If you won't be available to view the address, you can watch it later through the White House website, or you can read the remarks by clicking here. (You can also click on the link under September Events on the right.)

In parting I want to thank all the parents that made it out to curriculum night last week and for the incredible words of support and encouragement you offered. As we look ahead to the coming months together I want to remind you all, your child's learning experiences will be enhanced the more it involves you! See you on the blacktop!

Virtual Backpack

2009-08-30T16:42:00.002-05:00

Just a quick post to alert you all of a new feature this year at Mann: the virtual backpack. As part of the "green" movement across District 97, buildings and staff are encouraged to provide paperless options for distribution of home and school communications.

The Thursday Packet is a large packet of information sent home weekly with students to keep Mann families connected with activities and important events happening in our school community. Now the Thursday Packet, and other flyers from the Mann Office are available in the virtual backpack. No longer will your child come home with masses of letters from the office, rather families will be directed to the virtual backpack, located on the Mann School homepage.

Remember, Curriculum Night is this Tuesday, September 1 beginning at 6:00pm in Room 108. I will go over the daily routine for the year, explain some of the intricacies of our classroom, as well as provide helpful strategies for guiding students to a successful first grade experience. I'm looking forward to meeting all the parents involved in Room 108 this year! Be sure to bring your calendar as there will be a sign-up sheet for fall parent/teacher conferences. (The week of October 19-23, 2009.)

Let's Play Ball!

2009-08-26T16:10:00.007-05:00

Welcome back everyone! Room 108 is back on board for a new school year. The first full school day is officially in the books and there was an immense amount of enthusiasm and excitement from both students and teacher! The first week of school will serve as an adjustment period for every person in the classroom. We will all get acquainted with our new surroundings; classroom, peers, teacher and rules. One of the main features in Room 108 this year is the job chart, designed as a baseball field. Each student in the class has their name and class number on a jersey that will play different positions on the field. Each position has a corresponding job. Not only is this a great way to work in metaphor but it also encourages and guides children to think about classroom jobs as responsibilities for our team! Below is a picture of the field. Be sure to ask your child about it and other components of the room. The best way to stay involved in your student's learning experience is to talk with them every day about what is going on in their learning experience. Another way is to look in their "Mail" folder each day for important school related information.

The specials schedule is posted on the right hand side of the blog. To stay up to date with the happenings in Room 108 be sure to bookmark, subscribe or check back often to Mr. Reynolds' First Grade Blog. To be added to the parent e-mail list please e-mail me. Thanks to the many of you that have already introduced yourself to me on the blacktop. The coming days and weeks will be very exciting. I look forward to seeing everyone for curriculum night next week!

California Adventure

2009-07-14T13:28:00.004-05:00

Hey Everyone! It has been just over a month since my last post and I hope all of you have been enjoying the past month as much as me. Summer time is a great opportunity for travel, sports, family, holidays, barbeque, and all kinds of other things. I must say I have been keeping busy with all of the above and then some!

This post was inspired by my recent visit to the big Legoland in Carlsbad, California. Given the way District 97 has started incorporating Legos into the curriculum and the first grade field trip to the Legoland location in Schaumburg, I thought it only fitting to see the theme park in southern Cal.

Oh and I also made Legoland a destination because one of my life best friends is currently employed in the park as a artist drawing caricatures. He has amazing talent and it was an incredible opportunity to be sitting in a chair with one of my best friends drawing me. Take a look for yourself and see if this is how you imagine Mr. Reynolds to look as a cartoon. Some of you out there may recall the Olympic Day shirts for the 'Reynolds' Rhinos,' well this caricature is drawn by the same artist.

Hopefully you and your family have had some enjoyable experiences thus far in the summer of 2009. If not, there is still half the summer remaining before the first day of a new school year. Remember, it will only be the summer of 2009 once! Haha! In parting, I will leave you with a link to a blog post about music. I know there are many of you searching for new, good, and FREE music appropriate for ears of all ages. Check out this post, and see what you find. Happy listening!

Golden Apple Orientation

2009-06-11T20:16:00.004-05:00

Tonight was a unique experience that welcomed me to the Golden Apple "Family". I was invited, as a 2009 Teacher of Distinction, to attend an orientation session at the headquarters on Michigan Avenue in Chicago where I became acquainted with Golden Apple staff and fellow "TODs". We were given a thorough background of the foundation and learned about the seemingly endless ways to get involved in preparing excellent teachers in the state of Illinois. I had no idea my nomination would lead to such an outstanding opportunity in the field of education! The biggest project currently is the Golden Apple Scholars program which filters determined and ambitious high school students into a scholarship program that prepares them to be teachers at "in-need" schools. These "scholars" are granted terrific development programs, many taught by Golden Apple Fellows, TODs, and staff, to better prepare them as successful teachers.

As the summer days begin passing by I have found a new purpose for the blog - to keep readers up to date with my experiences as they relate to the realm of education. Everybody has unique experiences in their life but what do we learn from them? How do we apply them? Are these experiences of great value or simply experiences of joy lacking application of a greater significance? I like purposeful and valuable experiences. Prepare yourself readers for a new venture in my blogging. I have stayed strictly focused on Room 108 for the past two years and will return to that foci again in the fall but this summer I am continuing my path as an "educational risk-taker" and am going to extend my posts to hopefully a greater audience.

The greatest value I took from orientation tonight was the incredible network of people in which now I am interwoven. The educators I met tonight have dedicated their lives to imparting knowledge, teaching skills, and providing guidance for the youth (future) of not just America anymore, but the world! The Golden Apple is a tremendous network and it grows as teachers and its members continue to learn, share and lead! I look forward to the days and opportunities ahead and am excited to share with you some of what I discover! Hope you keep up! (Twitter helps for that too!)

The End of the Year

2009-06-04T13:49:00.004-05:00

It has finally come. The day so many kids and teachers look forward to. But now the feelings of excitement for summer and freedom are coupled with some feelings of sadness to know our time together in Room 108 is over. This has been an outstanding in year in so many ways for children, parents, and teachers. The last hour of school will be bittersweet indeed.

So what now? Are you going to escape the realm of academia? If not, how are you going to keep your little students sharp for the fall? Well a very simple way to stay intune with some basic academic concepts is to come right here, Mr. Reynolds' First Grade Blog! I will continue to post over the summer and add links as I find them. I've had some difficulty with my mobile posting applications but as I figure out what's wrong, posting via my iPhone will continue. I will be doing a fair length of traveling this summer and will have lots of neat finds to share. I'm sure of it!

Thank you all for following along with Room 108 this year and I wish you the best of days this summer. The students from our classroom are indeed much more able to learn now than ever before so feed them information, share with them knowledge, and most importantly involve them in as many learning experiences as possible!! Learning never stops!

Eric Carle Project

2009-05-18T23:35:00.001-05:00

Maybe you 'heard the tweets,' maybe you read the blog, or maybe you just heard the good ol' word of mouth about this project. Here is a picture sample of the kind of illustrations created during a tremendous author extension activity. Our school librarian brought the popular, uniquely talented, and self proclaimed 'picture writer' Eric Carle to life by guiding kids through one of his illustrating techniques. This technique had students wildly painting colored tissue paper, cutting it apart, and artistically using paint brushes with glue to paste them into all different kinds of bugs. This was an outstanding connection to many of the wonderul themes we have been exploring recently in first grade.

A Distinguished Classroom

2009-05-14T13:29:00.006-05:00

The final weeks of school are buzzing by us all in Room 108 as we have been focused on final academic challenges and cherishing the limited amount of learning we have left together. The month of May has evolved into reviewing a variety of skills and narrowing in the on the strategies that will prove most valuable in second grade! It seems only days ago sentences were being pieced together, now paragraphs are beginning to emerge. Words used to look like letters jumbled together, now chapter books are merely a title. Numbers used to appear with the greatest of confusion, now some are wondering if numbers go on forever. Those early September days are fading in the distance as sights are jumping ahead at a horizon full of opportunity and information!

As Unit 9 zips along, knowledge is spouting everywhere. Children are readily connecting skills to concepts, tying strategies to new problems, and unfolding new discoveries into foundations for further investigations. Discussion is seemingly ongoing during whole class reading as students are beginning to understand stories and authors on a deeper level than previously known. Participation is overflowing as students are eager to read aloud, answer a question, or share some unique insight. Likewise, mathematical skills are bursting to be applied on new problems, games, and puzzles. Now is truly an enjoyable time in the classroom as many students have earned the freedom to explore application in a variety of previously unknown ways.

So what now? Well an Olympic Week is set to take over the school next Tuesday, May 19. In the spirit of "Chicago 2016" the school has chosen to embrace the Olympic mottos in a 16 day stretch leading up to our Olympic Day, June 3. Each classroom has been randomly assigned a country to represent in an all-school Opening Ceremony. Over the course of these days students will be presented themed lessons and activities in special area classes like Art, P.E., Music, and Spanish. Room 108 was selected to represent India! Students located India on the map, identified bordering neighbors and geographical features, made personal connections to it's people, and are asking all kinds of questions! Hopefully you know a thing or two about India, if not, here is the World Fact Book page for it. (And the Wikipedia page, for good measure.)

Be sure to check the "Upcoming Events" on the right hand column of the blog. It is loaded with important days for students in Room 108. As the school year winds down there will be an assortment of special events and experiences designed to capture some of the final days we share together. Hopefully you have had some time to talk with your child about the tremendous things that have occurred in our classroom over the course of the school year, but especially in the last month. It is truly an honor and privilege to teach the children of this community and I hope everyone will enjoy the final weeks ahead.

The Great Ball Game

2009-05-11T13:57:00.001-05:00

Last week the students in Room 108 performed a play for kindergarteners. The children created scenery and created a stage for which to sit behind. When they read their parts, each child held up a self created puppet to depict their interpretation of their character. Plays and readers' theaters are a great way for children to strengthen reading skills such as comprehension and fluency.

Tweet-Unit 9 is Here!-Tweet

2009-05-07T13:51:00.002-05:00

The warm spring weather many have been waiting for is finally here! Now if the rain would hold off, everyone would have a chance to settle in for the warm months ahead. Everything is affected by the rain; schools, baseball teams, cities and nature! Staying indoors has urged Room 108 to becoming a Twitter classroom as well! So I must be very straightforward and admit this recent Twitter fad has finally caught up with me and I am giving it a shot. It is merely me, sending updates from the classroom and school, about the things Room 108 students are doing at that very moment. All "tweets" are time stamped and sent directly from either my computer or iPhone. Room 108 has already gained a few followers and I hope the trend continues. It is impossible for anyone to capture EVERYTHING students experience in the course of a day (Let's be honest, many of your children don't even remember what happened at school today!) but technology is allowing for an interesting way to capture major events. Hope you are able to occasionally follow!

Here is your "old-fashioned" curriculum update:

Unit 8 is over in both reading and math. The new theme for reading is "Being Afraid" and focuses children on stories relating to fear. Students are going to be engaged in constructing story diagrams and charts of all kinds to activate comprehension skills and make story connections. Personal experience and thoughts are going to prove most valuable for children as they discuss selections with their peers throughout the unit. Math is becoming a bit more challenging on a daily basis as the direction of Unit 9 heads into place value and fractions. The number grids (hundred charts) are going to be utilized on a daily basis as a strategy to solidify awareness of place value, for most it will be ones, tens, and hundreds. For others, the sky is the limit as numbers will be explored forwards and backwards, up and down, as well as diagonally. Fractions hopefully become more engrained in children's mind as they use pattern blocks and paper strips to identify equal parts, comparing fractions, and dividing wholes.

Science and social studies are aligning nicely as the end of the school year nears. Insects have infested our entire classroom and science curriculum. This works out well for geography skills and social studies as students are connecting bug types with geographic locations. Insects, such as ants and bees, also provide a nice insight into the intricacies of communities and the dynamics of their citizens. Don't be surprised if your child has already started, or begins soon, a sudden interest in creepy crawlies!

Room 108 is now Twittering!

2009-05-04T10:00:00.007-05:00

Happy Monday everybody! After a beautiful weekend of bright sun and warm breezes Room 108 is rejuvenated in a variety of ways. That, of course, means the Room 108 blog has got to relay some of this rejuvenation your way. I am attempting to do that in the form of Twitter! That's right... Room 108 is now Twittering! Technology, and more specifically the Internet and social networks, are progressing at an alarming rate. I am simply trying to keep you and your children up to speed. For more information, visit the Twitter homepage. But to keep it short and simple, Twitter provides you with the answer to one question, "What are you doing?"

So if you needed another reason to visit the Room 108 blog on a more regular basis, already have Twitter and looking for another Twitterer to follow, or just want to find out what this thing is, here you go!!

Art Appreciation: Ceramic Art

2009-04-27T20:59:00.005-05:00

Hey Everybody! Art Appreciation made a takeover in Room 108 recently and the theme was ceramic art. All thanks for the event goes to the art appreciation parents. Below is the photo slideshow soundtracked with a tune from Belle & Sebastian's album The Life Pursuit. Hopefully you like it! Muchas gracias to the unofficial Room 108 photographer!

Alright, enough is enough, I'm giving into the demand for BLOXORZ. This block flipping strategy game was introduced to me by a first grader last year and became an immediate amusement for many students, and me! Some of you may already be familiar with this game, others may not have a clue. And I'm willing to bet a few of you have children who have been trying to find this "block game where you need to make it fall through the hole." Haha! Well the shape it needs to fit through is not a hole, its a square, and hopefully your search is no longer. Remember to save the passcodes!!

A Real Treat

2009-04-23T12:02:00.008-05:00

Readers, Readers listen up, open your eyes and drink from the cup. Take a sip of this poetry, that Mr. Bill Buczinsky shared with our students and me!

Bill is a poet behind "A Child's Voice" an original organization dedicated to inspiring children to "play the game of poetry." There were two performances, one for the primary grades and one for the intermediate grades. Please ask your child about it because it was truly a unique, innovative and dynamic presentation of a timeless artform, Poetry.

Room 108 has been through quite an experience over the past two weeks and I sure hope you've had time to talk with your child about unique learning experiences. We were able to celebrate Earth Day (April 22) with an educational trip to the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago. The focus of the trip was insect life cycles and children participated in an insect specialist led set of activities titled "Migrating Monarchs." The event featured the life and times of monarch butterflies and the incredible journey these metamorphisized caterpillars undergo each year. The highlight of the nature museum might have been the Butterfly Haven which had over 1,000 butterflies representing more than 75 species! Click here for an overview of the permanent exhibits at the museum. (For pictures check out the Room 108 slideshow on the right hand column of the blog.)

Thank You Everyone!

2009-04-16T09:50:00.002-05:00

Today is a quick post and link courtesy of one of the parents of Room 108. She came across this article on the web and thought it would be of interest to all the blog readers. I think she is onto something. Here it is. Enjoy! And THANK YOU everyone for all you have done to help the Room 108 experience. None of this would be possible without all the positive support and encouragement you have offered. (And of course for reading the blog!)

Batter Up

2009-04-09T13:18:00.006-05:00

Now that Major League Baseball has officially begun, baseballs may be flying everywhere! Room 108 does not officially endorse any one team but the people inside of it definitely have their favorites! Students in the room are similar to baseball players as they want to keep their strikeouts to a minimum, their hits at a maximum but of course always learning and having fun playing the game!

Believe it or not, Unit 7 is done. Typically a unit lasts about four weeks and details all kinds of topics, culminating in a final day of assessment Room 108 knows as "Game Day." But as student development and unit themes progress, so does the curriculum layout of the academic calendar. The final Game Day is not beyond students but will instead be more of a celebration of knowledge and learning toward the end of the year. In the mean time, students will be engaged in more ongoing, as in day-to-day, activities that aren't simply captured in one lesson or activity. Instead lessons and activities may span multiple time frames, days, or even weeks! This kind of continuum offers students the opportunity to learn that not everything is done quickly or gained immediately rather contends the mind to engage and connect different subjects, contents and contexts.

Looking ahead to Unit 8 provides a spotlight on story reading and comprehension with greater emphasis on story understanding and strategies such as visualize, predict, connect, sequence, and conclude. Writing is going to round the bases with some poetry (also to honor national poetry month), four-square, and journaling; all very familiar writing experiences for students.

The biggest change of all academic stimuli will be our science topic. We have soared around the universe and are back on planet Earth to dig deep into the big world of BUGS! Insects is our new theme and there will be creepy, crawly critters all over Room 108! It certainly is an exciting time for children as the spring weather warms and the grass grows greener. Seems almost natural for children to start examining the tiny little six-legged bugs moving over everything outside, and sometimes inside too.

Let me also take this post as a chance to say an appreciative word of gratitude to all of my readers, supporters, and partipants in the Room 108 first grade experience. There has been quite a stir of excitement and energy swirling through the classroom in the recenet days and weeks. Hopefully everyone can keep up the action and efforts as we push forward into the final two months of the year!

March Toward Independence...

2009-03-26T14:04:00.005-05:00

The final week before spring break is just about over and it seems to have blown past all of us in Room 108. From story reading and discussions, to publishing and space walks, the experiences for everyone have kept us busy! For the long break I want to provide you with a list of good links to keep children thinking about the classroom and what many of them can't wait to get back to.

Jack Prelutsky - The poetic foundation for Room 108 is Shel Silverstein but the follow up poet is this outstanding wordsmith. Prelutsky has a knack for expanding vocabularies and writing higher level wordplays than our foundational leader. This is his homepage and it is excitingly kid-friendly. (This is also an unofficial request for any Prelutsky books you may have occupying bookshelves or desks at home.) Seeing as though we have read through just about everything Shel has put on paper, we need some more GREAT poetry for snack time!

Number Twins - This overly addictive fact game was introduced in computer lab and was a quick favorite for those fact-minded brains. The game can be reached via the Room 108 blog but sending specific web instructions with some children is like sending air mail via a hot air balloon: (interpretations left to your imagination.) Bottom line, this game is fun and has tons of other "math" game links on the same page. Notice the "sum" can be changed by clicking on the numbers directly above the playing board.

Tumblebooks - Let's be honest, sometimes reading can be a chore for your child (and you!) so I bring to your mouse click one of the all-time favorite links for students: TUMBLEBOOKS. Reading never seemed so engaging, enjoyable, and effortless. Not to mention this strategy is a great way to build fluency. There are books for all level readers, games and comprehension activities to match, and new books almost weekly! If you haven't checked these things out yet, NOW is the time!

These links should keep students connected over the week long break. If anyone needs more, look no further than the right hand side of the blog. There is a vast array of links to choose from and they all have relevance to the learning experience of the children in Room 108!

For those of you traveling for spring break, I bid you a safe journey. For all the locals hanging around, I wish upon you warm weather and lots of energy for outdoor spring activities! It will seem like only a blink of your eyes until Room 108 is up and running again, all systems go, for the final two months of the academic year!

If At First You Don't Succeed...

2009-03-20T13:14:00.003-05:00

...try, try again! After another great "Game Day" in Room 108 we are moving forward to a shorter, different curriculum feel of learning. As the first day of spring is officially upon us first graders are elevating their thinking in all subject areas. This week was a very busy week with a review day on monday, Game Day on Tuesday, Spring Share on Wednesday, Horseshoe Hooray First Grade celebration on Thursday, and Leprechaun Traps to share on Friday. With such a busy week of activities, it may seem easy for the "kiddos" to overlook the fact that all the while they are learning new concepts and applying a variety of skills in new contexts. Below is a picture from the all school celebration coined "SWISH into Superb Behavior." Students participated in a variety of physical skill activities that accumulated team points.

With one week left before spring break the room will be going through some "spring cleaning" activities. After the break we will be returning with some different unit themes and lots of fun new things to learn about in science and social studies.

The "March" Continues...

2009-03-12T13:37:00.002-05:00

Greetings Readers of Room 108's blog! We certainly were spoiled with the heat wave last week but brought back to the reality of early spring weather with temperatures below freezing this week. Please continue to dress your children according to the daily weather report! As spring time nears, so does individual growth toward first grade independence and heightened responsibility. Many students are improving their ability to follow directions and work independently but as with anything in life, there is always room for improvement.

Coming up next Tuesday is Game Day for Unit 6 in both Open Court Reading and Everyday Math. The language arts assessment will focus on high frequency words, phonetical sounds and skills such as /oo/, /ow/, /ou/, and /oi/, along with early grammar skills and comprehension strategies such as sequencing. The math assessment will reevaluate time telling skills, measurement, addition facts, and coin counting. All the students in Room 108 should be prepared for these assessments if they have been in class, complete their work, and engage in whole class activities. Some of the children are commenting on how much they like Game Days! That is a very strong indicator of attitudes toward school and learning.

Science and Social Studies continue to alternate days and times depending on current events and events happening around us. The current Moon cycle phase has allowed for great literature extensions as well as moon phase activities. Clear night skies have helped to inspire the viewing of constellations and recent closeness of Venus to the Moon has provided an extra ounce of energy to our sky gazing. Weather charting has also been much more engaging because of the drastic differences in daily weather! Social studies continues to expand on our place in the world with issues of Time For Kids and geography lessons focused on the United States and cardinal directions.

In parting I will thank all of you that support Room 108 and our mission in education. Each child is encouraged to grow, learn, and connect to the world every single day. It is with the help of all you that makes this possible. I've said it before, "No man is an island" and your child and I both need and appreciate your help. It is an absolute privilege to have the encouragement and reinforcement that so many of you provide to the first grade experience. Be sure to come see us all at the Spring Share performance next Wednesday, March 18 at 8:30am in the auditorium. And if time permits, join us for refreshments and healthy snacks at the "Cast Party" that follows!

Marching On...

2009-03-05T13:22:00.002-06:00

Salutations Readers! I write today as I gaze out open windows into a mostly clear blue sky with the sun shining and drying up what many of us hope is winter's remnants. As spring time nears, thoughts of outdoor activities and nature's beauty start stirring. Next will be shorts and sunglasses. And who could forget about the start of the baseball season?

Room 108 has spent the beginning of March wrapping up the wonderful journey around the world of Captain Bill Pinkney. If you have not heard this name repeatedly over the last couple of weeks then you must ask your child about him. Students have used an arsenal of academic skills, discussed a variety of concepts, and followed his path around the globe in an attempt to capture the spectacular feat the captain's great voyage. This theme has provided numerous extensions in all content areas: reading and writing of language of the captain's log, math with counting sailing days at sea and comparing to other modes of transportation, science with weather and its effects at sea, social studies with the variety of people he met, and geography with the cities, countries, continents, and oceans he touched.

As children move ahead in the first grade experience we will venturing deeper into the concepts we already know. Please continue the good work on homework packets and home links. Keep after those math facts and really emphasize subtraction along with addition. Everyday Math presents them as fact families with fact triangles as a manipulative.

Make sure to take a glance at the upcoming dates - especially Spring Share March 18th!! Hope to see you all there!

Constellations

2009-03-01T15:53:00.002-06:00

Friday was a deep trip into the great beyond astronomers call outer space! Students spent time learning about pictures in the night sky and listening to a couple tales that inspired their names. In addition to discussing the names of many astrological signs, children practiced ruler use and measurement with high number connect the dots constellation activities. Here is a short video outlining the basic of what used to be coined as "The Greatest Show on Earth": the nighttime sky. Fortunately we were able to have some soundtrack for our constellation explorations!

Multicultural Center Visit

2009-02-21T19:37:00.005-06:00

In recognition of African American Appreciation month, Lynn Allen, director of District 97's Multicultural Resource Center transformed the auditorium into a student friendly exhibit of artifacts and information about the cultures of transcontinental Africa. The exhibit began with Ms. Allen connecting the roots of African life to the United States and other countries, specifically those involved in the Triangle Trade.

This is a particularly difficult concept for most first grade children to comprehend but makes a unique connection to our new Open Court Unit titled "Journeys." As we follow the sailing trip of Bill Pinkney around the world we will discuss life at sea and many extensions from this great

captain's once in a lifetime journey.

After the introduction, brief background and overview of the exhibit the students were let loose to explore everything for themselves. Students were able to get their hands on musical instruments, traditional African games and daily use items, books and other artifacts from these timeless cultures.

Students seen here are examining a hand carved wood slab designed to be a cover for a cabinet or other wood worked storage space. Just above it is an oval shaped wooden artifact said to be a mixing/serving bowl. The kids sure had fun getting their hands on everything!

The End of Unit 5

2009-02-19T13:58:00.004-06:00

Salutations Readers! I want to begin by thanking all of you that participated in the most recent set of parent/teacher conferences. I appreciate your continued support, encouragement, and reflection pertaining to the education and experience of your little first graders. I am grateful for your honesty and openness in addressing the developmental needs of your children. Although they are not as "little" as they were 6 months ago, we still have plenty of learning experiences designed to foster continued individual growth!

Unit 6 in Open-Court phonics focuses on the final phonetic pieces; digraphs and dipthongs. Yes those terms may be unfamiliar to some of you but they are letter/vowel combinations that make a single sound, often irregular sounds, such as /oo/ spelled -ew or the /au/ and /aw/ in words like hawk and haul. These final phonetical recognition skills should really help those emerging readers take off into the independent realm, with increased fluency not far behind.

Our reading continues with a unit titled "Journeys." Whole class reading graduates from the big book to student readers. Each student will have a book in front of them to follow along as the class reads assorted stories and selections about travel. Reading will focus on concepts to increase comprehension skills and focus on various learning goals such as listening for details, developing vocabulary, clarifying, summarizing, and discussion.

Many writing skills are being adapted for individual use and performance as exposure to literature is becoming more familiar and concepts of print, such as punctuation and capitalization, are more apparent than in previous months.

Everyday Math in Unit 6 is more of the familiar concepts, but diving to a deeper level. Addition and subtraction facts are being related to one another in fact families and on fact triangles. Measurement explores the other side of the ruler, and metric system, with centimeters. Pattern blocks will be used to manipulate fractions and quarters will finally be used in the counting and exchanging of coins. Digital clocks will be investigated as we continue telling time to shortened intervals and also for the purpose of timing.

Keep up the fact practice at home as well as the nightly reading. There are links on the right hand side for both of these classroom connections. I suggested "Tumblebooks" to many of you during conferences for reading practice and if you haven't found the link already, its under "Fun Academic Links." Just follow the Tumblebook title and look for the "Storybooks."

District 97 Climate Survey

2009-02-09T13:06:00.002-06:00

Hello Parents of District 97 students. Here is the link for the Climate Survey you should have heard something about. Please take a few minutes of your time and fill one out for your student at Mann School. This survey is important for the future progress and direction of District 97. Your thoughts are asked for and appreciated.

Presidential Extensions

2009-02-05T13:19:00.003-06:00

Happy February greetings to you and yours! This month brings us all kinds of persons, places and things to honor, remember and celebrate. February is not only African-American Appreciation month but it also honors two of America's most historic presidents' birthdays and celebrates all presidents with a national holiday. And of course nobody can forget their loved one(s) on February 14th! Room 108 will be sure to take many of these events as great learning opportunities and extensions in the classroom.

The big theme right now is differentiation! With so many ability levels and minds soaring around the classroom it is very important to take an opportunity to meet, challenge, or remediate children at their respective developmental needs. In some cases students are paired, put in small groups or asked to work independently. It is amazing the kind of things the entire class can accomplish when each child has good direction, focus, and works hard to accomplish their tasks.

This week marked the beginning of parent/teacher conferences and they will continue through the end of next week. I appreciate all your help in scheduling! I know many of you had to shuffle a thing or two to make times work but I have to thank you for making it work! I look forward to meeting with each of you and discussing the progress and future direction for your student.

I will leave you with a link for a presidential "Guess Who" courtesy of Funbrain.com. Some of you might want to rack your brain alongside your child to attempt a guess... How well do you really know our presidents??

Keep up the great work and communication at home! "No man is an island" and if your children don't say thank you for all the help keeping up in Room 108 then let me tell you how grateful I am right now! Working together makes for some of the best learning experiences!

Groundhog Snowball Throw

2009-02-03T12:22:00.003-06:00

Puxatawney Phil indeed saw his shadow this year which means six more weeks of winter weather. Room 108 recognized the annual event by watching some video footage, during snack time, of the "Inner Circle" at Gobbler's Knob to see the legendary groundhog. Here is a pretty simple little flash game the children really wanted me to pass along. There is nothing academic about this game... it simply provides an out-of-school free time internet game! Click here to throw some snowballs!