Our 2018 March Madness Book Tournament is underway. We started with the Sweet 16 and we are down to the Final Four. We have about 200 students participating in our tournament to declare the 2018 book of the year. Students in grades 1-4 are getting two books read to them a day. Then, the students vote. Teachers are adding votes to a spread sheet and when all the participating classes have read and voted we are able to change the bracket. It is so fun to walk by the large bracket by the lunch room and hear the students discussing their favorite book picks! Click on this link: 2018 March Book Madness List. The link will take you to a document of all the tournament books in their Sweet 16 match ups. There is also a brief description on each book.
Ask your child about their favorites in the tournament. We have been posting about our favorites to SeeSaw. Some of the books are funny and others are moving. The students seem to be loving the true stories the most. The students all made their predictions on Friday and filled out a bracket with their opinions. Time will tell! The voting is getting harder and harder. Stay tuned to learn what book wins!
We are basketball-ing it up in the combo! We were so excited to get tickets to the NAIA tournament. Thank you to Tire-Rama and Scheels for the opportunity. We saw a game between Menlo and LSU. We had terrific seats right behind the Menlo team. The students cheered their hearts out! I really believe we gave Menlo an extra spirit boost to win the game. The team often looked back at us with huge smiles and a couple players even came up to the kids after the game to give high fives! So much FUN!!!
Also along with the tournament, we had a visit from the members of the Blue Raiders. The ladies did an assembly on character. The Blue Raiders came to our school last year, it was great to see the team again!
I never pass up a good theme opportunity. Since we were talking so much basketball, we did some academic tasks relating to the sport. First, we read a great book called Hoop Genius about how basketball was invented. Did you know the sport was created by a teacher! From the book we worked on vocabulary and using text evidence to draw conclusions. We also practiced fluency by reading a play based on the book.
Additionally, students read nonfiction articles about basketball legends. We played a game called grammar-ball to practice identifying parts of speech. Further, we did some writing. We made a large poster thanking Tire-Rama for our NAIA tickets.
One of the favorite activities was a STEM challenge. The third graders were given the challenge to create a tower that could hold a basketball for 20 seconds. The groups could only use masking tape and newspaper to create the tower. Groups were challenged to make the tower as tall as possible.
The second grade leprechaun traps were a huge success. Although I never received any news of an actual caught leprechaun, there was evidence that some students were close! Further, I did personally witness evidence of creative thinking and excellent engineering. Students shared their traps with the class, made videos on SeeSaw about how their traps worked, and were able to show off their hard work to the other three second grade classes. What a great at home STEM project! I hoped you enjoyed sharing the experience with your child as much as I enjoyed their presentations on their clever designs.
We love Project Lead the Way! Our last module was about the forces of flight. There were five activities that we worked our way through. Each activity was a project based, hands on scenario that had the students using science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to learn about flight.
We started by learning about balanced and unbalanced forces. Next, we learned about propellors. Ask your child if they know the four forces of flight: lift, weight, thrust, and drag. Through the study of flight, the students were introduced to Newton's laws of motion. We used an app to design different gliders, then we created gliders from our blueprints. Last, we tested our gliders from our own binder launch pad.
In our final project of the flight module, students had to create another glider that would carry weight or cargo. The scenario was that there was a community in Nebraska that needed some relief supplies. The gliders could get there faster than trucks on the roads. Students had to design a glider that would carry as much cargo as possible to Nebraska. Nebraska was 120 cm from the launch site. Students had three flight trials. They were to record at least one trial and reflect in the caption. Please check your child's SeeSaw to see their flight trail video. Here are just a couple examples of their video work.
One of my favorite times of year....the Read-A-Thon! This year was bigger than ever. All Eagle Cliffs students participated, kindergarten to 5th grade. It was our very own Winter Reading Olympics!
As defending champions, we were NOT going to let that trophy slip away. The Connected Combo worked so hard. What an amazing team of incredible readers! The students were so motivated. Here are some ways we encouraged each other and kept up our reading.
First, we made our own Olympic torches. These torches were a labor of love. The students painted the wood blocks. Miss Frey lettered our names. Then, Mrs. Jensen created the flame. The students read to earn stars. Each half hour of reading was represented by a star. Students were great at brining in their logs so we could add stars. Also, when students read the goal of 300 minutes they earned a small torch trophy.
We added fun to our torches with some Olympic Reading Events. Students had a reading challenge. If they completed certain "events" they could earn bronze, silver, and gold medals to their torches. For instance, one event was the bobsled. If students read for 20 minutes in the bathtub, they completed the bobsled event. We also had the biathlon where students had to read aloud to an adult. When you are reading hours every night, the Olympic events added some extra motivation. I got great pictures from so many parents. I loved to see the students completing their reading events with big smiles on their faces. Thanks for the amazing support.
At the end of the read-a-thon, these connected combo kids read 18,800 minutes in ten days! Six students read over a thousand minutes! And.....EVERY.SINGLE.STUDENT...read the goal of 300 minutes or more. Hard to beat 100% participation! Best of all, I see true improvement in the students' reading. The extra work has propelled them even further with meeting academic goals.
We would find out if we won at a school wide assembly. We marched into the assembly to the Olympic theme song. I was so proud! The school had great participation and our students were shining stars! For reading the most total minutes in the entire second grade, our class had the silver and bronze medalists. We had the gold and silver medalists for the entire third grade. And.... drum roll, please.... the trophy returns! We will have a pizza party soon to celebrate our read-a-thon victory! Thanks again for your focus, commitment, and support of our reading!
Chinese New Year was February 16. We celebrated the Year of the Dog with a BreakOut! Students worked together in groups to solve a series of clues. The clues had math problems, word puzzles, and even calculations that used the Chinese Zodiac calendar. When the students solved a clue, the answer was one of the combinations to our locked box. The box had 5 different locks.
Of course, the Connected Combo was able to break in! Inside the box were red envelopes with gold coins, a traditional Chinese New Year gift. We also celebrated with Year of the Dog by bringing dog stuffed animals, munching on puppy chow, and starting new novel studies. Each group is reading a novel about....you guessed it....a dog! We have 4 different books: Tornado, Five True Dog Stories, Because of Winn Dixie, and Everything for a Dog. Ask your child which book they are reading.
