Week of October 5

Last week was such a fun week! I've been at the ITEC Conference since Sunday, so I'm finally getting around to our weekly update:

Our Preschool & AK students enjoyed the story Wolfie the Bunny by Ame Dyckman. I love, love this book, and love Ame! Ame was kind enough to Skype in and read Woflie to our kindergarten students last year. She is amazing.

Kindergarteners read the book Picture a Tree by Barbara Reid. These kids are studying trees during science time in their classrooms. After reading, we drew some different trees on the Promethean board.

The kids drew trees for different seasons. They are quickly learning how to use the different tools on the board. This technology truly changes the way students learn, and I love it!

Here are some students in action!

First graders have begun a poetry unit! Poetry is one of my all time favorite things, so we had some fun this week! We looked at two different poems, and practiced increasing our fluency and rate. First I read the poem, then we read it together, then we added music! Rapping poems is one of my favorite things and the kids really enjoy it too. This year, I brought in a couple of microphones, and that made it even more fun!

Mrs. Huinker's students rapping!

Second graders are learning about characteristics of fiction vs. non-fiction. This week, they worked with a partner to make a t-chart. Each group had a fiction and a non-ficion book, and they wrote down their ideas and shared out. Next week, we'll look at even more differences!

Third graders are practicing using evidence to support their answers about a text. This week we looked at some poems to find text evidence. After reading, we looked at the questions and used the text to go back and support the answer, using the highlighting tool. Again, having the Promethean board completely changes how we learned this concept. We are so lucky!

Fourth graders started brainstorming ideas for states research. We are going to be creating a slideshow and commercial with the top 5 reasons to come to their state of choice. We started taking notes in an app called Mindmup--but I didn't get any pictures! Stay tuned next week!