The Rotary of Maple Valley gave us brand new Dictionaries!

Today we used our handheld Activote devices to do a reading survey. One of our questions was about our "fit" books that we were reading today. We asked what genre the book we were reading was; is it realistic fiction, fantasy or historical fiction? Our survey was displayed as a bar graph. It was great fun to use this technology in our class.

 So Fun!!!! We all earned some "choice time" today! When I announced that the class had earned some choice time the cheers went up, the paints, legos, drawing tools and blocks came out and a great time was had by all. We have all been working so hard it was fantastic to be able to reward ourselves with a good time with friends.

My daughter Joee wanted to do something special for our classroom this year and so she made this wonderful tree in our library area. It even has a wise old owl living in it.

I spent a bit of time today taking photos of places in Maple Valley so that we can discuss our community in the next couple of weeks. We will be exploring Maple Valley and it's history during our study of "The Communities of the Puget Sound"
Do you recognize the place in this photo?

Having such a beautiful Saturday at hand has made me think about the story we read on Friday. "The Other Way to Listen" by Bird Baylor is a wonderful story about truly listening, being quiet in nature and listening to it speak. I hope we all get a chance to spend some time in nature this weekend and listen to what is around us. 

 

Our Friday of the year and that means it is "Read with a Friend Day!" We all get excited about Fridays because we get to read special books that only come out on Fridays and we get to read with a buddy. Our buddies can be a stuffed animal or one of our classmates. We always enjoy sharing our favorite books with a friend. This is not a quiet reading time! Lots of talking about books is going on.

Today we had several suggestions for what to take a picture of for our post. So many in fact that I decided to  post two. This is a photo of our white board work that goes with this weekend's homework. We are exploring how to do place value drawings for word problems. Some are very complex and we did quite a bit of math talk to make sure we all felt comfortable solving these types of problems! We are really doing well with our place value learning and review!!!

Today our class discussed with partners and in whole group, the classroom expectations for behavior. The three statements are short, to the point and cover almost all the classroom needs. Students are encouraged to take responsibility for their own behavior. We also discussed that the nature of our conversations will only include words that are either kind, helpful or encouraging! We have a fantastic group of kids who understand what a true learning environment should look like and sound like!

Everyday we use our Key content chart to help us visualize the key learning we should gain from each lesson. We discuss the learning expectation before, during and after each lesson to check for understanding. 

New Dry Erase Boards!

Today we got to explore our new dry erase boards and we learned some vocabulary that we will be using with our new math curriculum. This is an example of our place value drawing that we will be using as a proof picture when doing math problems. What a great first day we all had!!!!

Flower from a summer walk.

Last day of summer vacation! School starts tomorrow!