First Student Guest Blogger...so exciting!!!

Hi!  My name is Hailey and I'm this week's guest blogger!  This week, I had fun doing the biography.  I am doing mine on Martha Graham.  We had to write an essay about someone special then we will present it at 9:00 on Friday.  I can't wait!!!  We are going to have so much fun!!! (And they did!)

The next thing I liked to do this week was our "missing" posters.  We had to do it on someone we read about from the story Welcome Comfort.  It was spectacular!!!

This week was a very fun week!!!  I wish this week happened again!!!

See you next time ~
Hailey

Fabulous weekend at the Savannah Children's Book Festival!

I met my two children's librarian friends in Savannah this weekend for this wonderful book festival.  Lee, Lori, and I are already making plans to go next year.  It was completely free of charge!  There were many authors present to meet and chat with.  They were also available for book signings.  I LOVE children's books and had many signed this weekend.  

 The Debt Monster author, Mary Becker.
http://www.thedebtmonsterbook.com

 They let us create our own crowns, even though we aren't officially kids!

So excited to meet the author of The Sisters Grimm...Michael Buckley!

http://www.michaelbuckleyonline.com

With Patricia Bee, author of Try'umsee's Wings (A Gullah Tale)

Super Busy Getting Ready for our Thanksgiving Break

Turkey Synonyms for overused words.  I wanted to do the gravestones around Halloween, but time got away from me.  These are turning out very cute!  I saw this on Life in 4B blog.  http://lifein4b.blogspot.com/  She has a million great ideas.  I want to be in her class!

Fact Family Portraits...saw these somewhere online...they look fabulous!

Finally, our Bucket Filling Door.  Great to come in to a nice comment about yourself!

Reading Challenges

I am really struggling with getting some (quite a few) to actually READ.  It is completely shocking to me, as I would read all day every day if I could.  So....I am going to try this fun activity by the Queen of Third Grade, Beth Newingham.  I love her!  Can't say that enough.  Even though I am teaching 4th grade, this is a wonderful plan to get kids EXCITED about reading!

Beth Newingham's homepage

Reading Detectives...students read a mystery and try to solve it before the end.  They learn new words like alibi, suspects, red herring (gotta love that one!).  I am hoping that this will entice some of my fake readers and nonreaders to start loving it.  How can we be fabulous fourth grade writers without sampling some fabulous writing?!

One more thing that I have started AND they are on board with it, is genre tickets.  I found some fabulous tickets that they will cash in after they read that particular genre.  Once they have read (and proved their reading) all of the genres, I am going to do something super special for them.  I am thinking pizza party after 4 or 5 have done it.  Maybe before that.  Thanks to the Oh Boy 4th Grade blog! She has some fabulous ideas for 4th grade!

Oh Boy 4th Grade link

O.R.E.O. Project 2011

We had a fabulous time participating in the O.R.E.O. Project this year.  We all got to stack Oreos and use the data to determine mean, median, mode, and range.  The most cookies stacked in Jamestown was 25.  Our mean was 37, 20 was the median.  We had two modes:  18 and 25.  And our range was 12!

10 packs of Oreos...

Stacking high!

...and they tumble!

Some fun sculptures after all the math!

Thanks to Projects by Jen for letting us participate!  Can't wait until next year!

Click here for information and results from this year's project.

October 1st...Getting ready for Halloween!!!

The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg is a great book for teaching writing...especially for the month of Halloween!  I have the portfolio version as well as the book version so I decided to put the portfolio on a bulletin board to leave up all month for inspiration.  I cannot wait for the new version that comes out October 25th.

From BarnesandNoble.com:

An inspired collection of short stories by an all-star cast of best-selling storytellers based on the thought-provoking illustrations in Chris Van Allsburg’s The Mysteries of Harris Burdick.
 
For more than twenty-five years, the illustrations in the extraordinaryMysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg have intrigued and entertained readers of all ages. Thousands of children have been inspired to weave their own stories to go with these enigmatic pictures. Now we’ve asked some of our very best storytellers to spin the tales. Enter The Chronicles of Harris Burdick to gather this incredible compendium of stories: mysterious, funny, creepy, poignant, these are tales you won’t soon forget.
 
This inspired collection of short stories features many remarkable, best-selling authors in the worlds of both adult and children's literature: Sherman Alexie, M.T. Anderson, Kate DiCamillo, Cory Doctorow, Jules Feiffer, Stephen King, Tabitha King, Lois Lowry, Gregory Maguire, Walter Dean Myers, Linda Sue Park, Louis Sachar, Jon Scieszka, Lemony Snicket, and Chris Van Allsburg himself.
     Van Allsburg's Harris Burdick illustrations have evoked such wonderment and imagination since Harris Burdick's original publication in 1984; many have speculated or have woven their own stories to go with his images. More than ever, the illustrations send off their eerie call for text and continue to compel and pick at the reader's brain for a backstory—a threaded tale behind the image. In this book, we've collected some of the best storytellers to spin them.

Vivid Verb Graffiti Wall

Thanks to Mrs. E, we have a very cute graffiti wall full of words that we can use instead of bo-ring words!  Some of my students designed the "brick wall" but tracing over our tile floor.  The new put the words up!

Karate chopped!  Pretty vivid...way better than chopped or cut up.

Very colorful yelped...instead of shouted.

I really like this one!  Completed instead of done.  How many times a day do I hear, "I'm done!"  How about, "My work's completed!"?

Our Very First Mystery Reader!

This is once again a Beth Newingham idea!  Family members were asked to sign up to come read in the classroom.  Tyler's uncle sent in some hints about who he might be and my kids tried to determine who was coming in.  I want to get some of the school's staff to do this for me too!  It was a lot of fun.  The book that Tyler's uncle read is called Salt in His Shoes about a young Michael Jordan and how he was not happy with not being taller.  His mother told him that he could put salt in his shoes and that would help him grow more quickly.  I love this book and it was nice to hear a male read it to the kids.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/salt-in-his-shoes-deloris-jordan/1102255161?ean=9780689834196&itm=1&usri=salt%2bin%2bhis%2bshoes%2bmichael%2bjordan%2bin%2bpursuit%2bof%2ba%2bdream

What's Been Going on in 4th Grade Isla Jamestown!

So much going on that it is hard to get to do the fun things I enjoy like searching blogs, pinteresting, and face book!  This weekend I hope to get caught up enough that life gets sort of back to normal!  Since I have been a fourth grade teacher, we have done quite a bit of work in the classroom.  I am sharing some pictures of some of the fun activities that we have been doing.  Most of them I found while surfing through blogs and the web in general.  Not sure where some of them came from because I would find something interesting and just save it to use (hopefully) later.  I would love to give the credit where credit is due...if any of these is your idea, please let me know.

This is a Beth Newingham idea!  I love her and ALL of her ideas.  We are waiting for postcards from everywhere!  Mrs. Newingham's website

This is a CRISS strategy.  A missing person's poster to help with inferring character traits.

We read The OK Book by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and wrote about the things we were ok at and the things we were fabulous at.

I love Jack Prelutsky...we read Green Giant to get an idea about developing a mind movie when we do our own writing.  The kids kept their eyes closed while I read the poem aloud and then drew what they saw in their minds.  

To practice writing with details, we picked the favorite part of our favorite birthday ever and wrote with details to describe that one favorite part!  This was a wonderful idea from my new teammates!

This is one of my favorites!

I love this one!  This student's favorite part of her favorite birthday was the ring that her dad got for her!

New Position!!!

Today, I was offered and accepted a position at Sabal Elementary in 4th Grade!!!  SO excited!

Target Gift Card Giveaway!

Who doesn't love Target?!  Head on over to Kleinspiration for your chance to win her 500 follower giveaway for a Target Gift Card.  Deadline is Tuesday Aug. 9th.  Follow her directions...there are several ways to be entered!

While surfing around the web today, I came across POM POM POINTERS!  I found it on the NBCT website (National Board for Professional Teaching Standards) ...they were shown oh so briefly in a video of National Board Certified Teachers.  The teacher in the video was using them in a group and announced to use your Pom Pom Pointer and show me this word or that word.  Very cute.  To experiment, I purchased assorted size dowels and assorted size glitter poms.  It's very easy to hot glue the poms to the dowels...takes no time at all.  Very cute idea I thought I should share!  In this Tim Horton's small coffee can are 24 assorted Pom Pom Pointers!

A little book shopping...

So I am in Ottawa for my last weekend.  I leave next week for home.  After the movie today, Joe and I went by Chapter's.  I found some nice bargain books but I came across a book that I had never heard of and it is fabulous!  It's called The Black Book of Colors by Menena Cottin and Rosana Faria.  The whole book has a black background but it talks about different colors on each page...how they sound, or smell, or taste, or feel.  The book is also written in Braille.  The cool thing to me is that after each color is described, the next page is embossed with an image.  For example, the description of red included as tart as a strawberry so the next page had embossed strawberries on it.  I love it and am already thinking of ways I might use it in my class next year!

I can't figure out how to link Barnes and Noble here so you can see a description, but they do have it!

Changing things a bit...

I have not been keeping up with my Canadian adventures on this blog very well...Sorry Jen!  I am hoping that using it as a record keeping tool of my classroom will be more fun for me!  Right now, just looking for a job...hoping that more get posted as we get ssssoooo close to the new school year.  I have learned so much from reading other teachers' blogs and websites this past year.  I really have nothing new to offer...I am tweaking ideas, activities, and lessons for use in Jamestown 2011-2012.  My imaginary classroom is fabulous!  I so hope that I am able to make it all a reality soon.

Stay tuned...