Horseshoe Hooray!

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

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!