Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Thirteenth Week

Whew! I can't believe this is only the thirteenth time I've seen each class. They have grown SO much already! See for yourself - just take a look back at the archived posts from previous months.

Fifth grade students are responding to articles on TweenTribune.com. Take a look at some of the articles and read our text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections in the comments section. Our usernames start with our first name and end with our homeroom teacher's last name.

Fourth grade is continuing to work on a data webquest. The link is posted on their grade level blog. We are finding the median, mode, and range of a series of data about shark attacks in different states over a period of 11 years. We are using Excel this week to express the data in the form of a graph.

Third through fifth grade students are continuing to improve their typing skills using Type2Learn for the first 15 minutes of every class in the lab. We're keeping track of our wcpm progress using the sense-lang.org typing test. You'll find the link on the right side of this blog under LESSON LINKS.

Third grade students have a new site added to their grade level blog - AAAMath.com! We are using this site to help build fluency with our multiplication and division facts. The site provides practice for basic facts, times the students, calculates the percent accurate, and can produce printable record sheets to track progress.

Second grade students are creating an instructional video to teach the world about understandings from their recent fraction unit in Math. We are creating paper sliding videos that the students record and narrate using the flip camera.

First grade students are continuing to build their understanding of adding two 2-digit numbers wihtout regrouping. Last week, we created a word problem, illustrated, and narrated it using Pixie. This week, we are completing an activity in Pixie to apply our skills and using the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives to further explore adding tens and ones with manipulatives.

Kindergarten is also using Pixie this week! Currently, the students are learning about money (coin names, identifying characteristics, values)with their teachers, so we applied our newly learned skills with a Pixie activity. The students sorted coins by name and typed in the value for each. Our work was printed, so we could use this resource in the classroom and at home.