Five for Friday 10/24/2014

I'm joining Kacey @Doodle Bugs Teaching for her linky Five for Friday.

We are departmentalized, I teach science and social studies, but I am also supporting the reading teacher with reading comprehension and writing. On Fridays, we do not rotate classes. We have laptop carts in the classroom and the students do a couple of lessons in Think Through Math and take AR tests. They also take their reading and vocabulary tests. It's my favorite day because it is the only day that there seems to be time for something fun and creative. Our district uses Building Academic Vocabulary, the students have a BAV notebook that they use each week. On Fridays, I have them do word art with one of the BAV words. When we first started, a lot of them just didn't get what I was talking about ( I did show them examples), so they would write the word and just decorate it to make it look pretty. We took a couple of weeks off and tried it again, I think most of them are starting to get it! Here's a few examples.

I have been meaning to post for a long time, but I just don't get to it. This is not something form this week, but I wanted to share anyway. In Oklahoma, 3rd grade social studies is all Oklahoma history, symbols, etc... We were getting ready to learn about the Oklahoma State Seal. I should have thought of this, but I didn't. The kids had no idea what the state seal was, they all thought it was an animal! lol Oklahoma State Seal was one of our BAV words that week so I decided to have a little fun. I told them what the word was and I told them I wanted them to draw a picture of what they thought it looked like. Here an example of what I got.

It would have been a great time to do a lesson in homonyms!

I guess I should have titled this post Five Fridays instead of Five for Friday. Last week the reading teacher was working with the kids on similes and metaphors. On Friday, I decided to do an activity with my class that I had seen on Pinterest.

http://www.pinterest.com/pin/418834834068535128/

Instead of using a real picture, I had them draw a picture. Most of them did a fantastic job.

Hmmm, funny like Jimmy Kimmel...she is staying up too late! LOL

Hahaha, I can run faster than a bumblebee. I love it!

What???? I love soccer just like a turtle, maybe he has seen a soccer playing turtle on Facebook. ;)

The kids liked doing them and I loved reading them. It was very easy to see who understood and who still needed help. 

We have been doing some science this year. I started off with some very simple experiments so I could make sure the procedures were down. I couldn't believe how engrossed they were when we did the water drops on the coins. They weren't even noticing that I was taking pictures.

Since my school is departmentalized, the third grade team decided to get together for conferences we have 75 students totla, but there were some that had no academic or grade issues that we didn't need to see. When we took those students out we needed to schedule around 60 conferences. It took a lot of planning and several extra days after school, but we got them finished. The best part was I saw all 21 parents that I had scheduled for conferences! No phone conferences! I did have to re-schedule a few, but they all showed up. Great way to start my weekend!

No Excuses!

You can certainly tell it's not summer any more. I was posting two and sometimes three times a week, now I' doing good to get one a month. I don't know how all of you other bloggers do it.

So far, life in 3rd grade has been going very well. It isn't quite what I expected, I thought they were going to be so much more mature than my first graders, I thought they would listen to instructions the first time, I thought they would be a little quieter, I thought they would be responsible for their supplies and not lose them all of the time.  I was WRONG. Hahaha, they are still kids and some just haven't quite gotten there yet.

My new school has a "Celebration" once a month and it usually has a theme. Our first one was "Our future's so bright" Everyone was supposed to wear sunglasses. Our second one in September was Super Leaders, dress as your favorite super hero. Most of the teachers dressed as Ninja Turtles and performed this little dance.

As you can imagine the kids went wild. I didn't dress as a Ninja because I had already started working on a different super hero when I found out where to buy the shirt. I sort of made up my own super hero. Meet Captain Hypothesis! A lab coat and goggle wearing super hero that will help you answer scientific questions. Sorry I didn't realize how blurry this picture was until I started to make this post.

Now everyone has started decorating their doors for Fall/Halloween. There are some really cute ones. Here are a few.

So after seeing all of these adorable doors, I was trying to come up with something original. what started out as a rather boring door with a spider on it evolved into a door that my kids absolutely love. Since our school is working on the Seven Habits of Happy Kids/The Leader in Me, I thought I would add a few of them to the mix.

Look at these kiddos, I told them to look scared...they did great!!! 

I have so many things I've been doing since school started, maybe I will get a chance to catch up this poor old blog of mine during my upcoming (YES!) Fall Break.

Our Future's So Bright!!!! (And COOL...Now)

I have been back to school for four days.  I have wanted to post several times, but just haven't had the energy to do it.  I have been totally zapped each day. I am hoping it was because my AC wasn't working properly. It was running, but it wasn't cooling...much. Just to make sure it wasn't just me, I brought a thermometer up to school on Thursday to see how hot it actually was. The last time I looked at it, it was 87 (no wonder I was sweating). 

To explain things a little clearer, I had turned in a work order when I first started working in my room. I think someone from the district had came out and serviced all of the AC units, changed all of the air filters. Since mine (it's a window unit) was running, I guess they thought that would solve the problem, well it didn't. Since I was new to the school, I didn't want to do too much complaining, so I asked the principal if I could take my last class of the day to the library since it was hot in the room. She said it was OK, but reminded me that the East side of the building was hot in the morning. (Our rooms have 6 HUGE windows so the east rooms get the sun in the morning and the west rooms get the sun in the afternoon.) My principal is great! She just hadn't been in my room in the afternoon to realize how hot it was.

Fortunately for me, I have a teachers son in one of my afternoon classes, she stopped by to see how things were going. You can imagine her reaction when she came into my room that was 87 or hotter by that point. She went straight to the principal. My principal came down and was shocked when she realized how hot it was, it wasn't even 15 minutes later that two maintenance men came to check it out. the next morning they came back and got it fixed. I'm hoping on Monday it will be even cooler, the room was already 85 when it got fixed so it had a lot of cooling down to do.

I have more things to share, but I am going to start with our school theme, "Our Future's So Bright." My principal got all of the staff t-shirts to wear the first day. Here is a picture of her wearing it, one minute before the we started letting the kids in on the first day of school.

Since it was a school-wide theme, we all did bulletin boards with different variations of it it. I thought there were some great ideas, so I thought I would share them.

I took the saying completely literal. she said neon colors and my budget was tight so I bought poster board from Dollar Tree. When the kids first came to school my board looked like this.

The sunbursts and stars have different occupations on them. On the second day of school I took pictures of the kids with "shades" on and a board saying what they wanted to be when they grew up. Here are a couple of the photos.

I replaced the sunburst and stars with the photos. Now it looks like this (except not blurry!).

Here are some of the boards my great co-workers came up with. I may have more to share later, a few of them are still putting the finishing student touches to their boards. I also have somehow lost some pictures of some boards.

Hopefully now that the AC is working, I'll have enough energy to post in the evenings! HA

Hope you are off to a terrific year!