Twas the Night Before

Twas the day before Christmas break and all through the classroom.....

We had such a great day before break.  The students looked cute and comfy in their jammies.  We started the day with a great assembly.  Skyview High School came and gave a Christmas music sampling.  They were fantastic!  Then, we came back to the classroom and made blanket forts! The students had a blast!  While building, some students said this was like S.T.E.M.  Ha!  Sure is!  Once the forts were built, we had a read in.




We had sometime in the afternoon to be crafty.  We made these cute little ornaments and listened to Christmas music.

To end the day, we had a S.T.E.M. challenge. 



These students are so creative and love a challenge.  Their ideas were fantastic, and their presentations of the parachutes were excellent.  The challenge gave us an opportunity to talk about gravity, drag, mass, and friction.  We will be studying flight in the New Year, so this was a fun first taste.

Christmas Kindness

 We have been talking a lot about kindness and spreading love and joy through acts of kindness.  School wide, we have been performing acts of kindness and tracking them with a kindness chain in the hallway.  The week's homework was to perform a random act of Christmas kindness and write down what you did.  I was blown away by the great ideas.  Thank you for your tremendous support with our acts of kindness.

Hour of Code

We are up for this challenge again this year.  We love to code.  Click start to begin writing your lines of code.

START

We celebrated "Computer Science Education Week."  The week was declared to bring computer science into schools and promote student interest in coding.  The Connected Combo wrote over 2000 lines of code.  I see some future programmers in this class.  This year the favorite challenges were programming Minecraft characters, click here to be linked to the challenges.  The students had to solve puzzles to program characters through mazes.  While they thought they were "playing" they were programming with loops, conditionals, and algorithms.  Students used logic and problem solving skills.  The challenges also tested their persistence and "I can" attitude.  As the students moved up in levels, the students received video tutorials by gifted computer scientists in the field like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

You probably heard about our most exciting coding adventure: Dash and Dot, our classroom robots.  The students just love them! Using Dash and Dot and an app called Blockly, students are given missions.  For instance, the children had to program Dash to dance when it hears a clap.  I purchased  these robotic kits through a grant I wrote.  The grant was funded by my hero Mr. Tom Wardell and the Billings Education Foundation.  The students are doing amazing things!  You should hear the squeals of delight when they are successful.

We had so many great coding opportunities.  We played some unplugged games.  Our Osmos have a great coding activity where students manipulate blocks to program.  Of course, we have a couple favorite coding apps on the iPad, like LightBot.

Merry Grinchmas

We had a terrific Grinch day!  It was a busy, joyful day!  At the beginning of the day we analyzed the grinch song from the cartoon version of the movie.  The song is jam packed with similes and metaphors.  We talked about the two different figures of speech, then we took the song line by line to find all the similes and metaphors.  We had amazing Grinch kabobs to help our thinking.

 We, of course, read the book that inspired our theme day. I have the book as an app.  The book is $3.99 on the app store. It is an OM book, meaning the children can read the book or listen to an audio version.  The book also has some animations.  Click here to link to the book in the app store. While we listened to the book we had delicious Grinchy popcorn.  

After listening to story, we did a comprehension scoot.  Students moved around the classroom to answer 18 different comprehension questions about the story.  We discussed the important theme of the book at length.  It's the perfect book to capture the spirit of the season.







In the afternoon we solved some Grinch word problems and then we had a S.T.E.M. challenge.  The students had to use gum drops and tooth picks to build the tallest Christmas tree.  I can see their engineering skills growing with every challenge.

We had a great Grinch day.  Thank you for your tremendous support with treats.  I was so sad to not get a group Grinch picture.  They are just the cutest!