Learning About Area and Perimeter- Snowball Style!

I had seen the idea of having a snowball fight to review material around the blogosphere, but when I saw this post from Looking From Third To Fourth who used the idea to review multiplication, something made the wheels in my brain to start spinning and I came up with a fun way to review perimeter and area which is the unit we are currently working on.

I had the students take a piece of paper and fold it in fours and rip them apart.  They wrote numbers from 1 to 10 on each of their papers, and crumpled them.

 On my call they threw all of their snowballs into the center of the classroom.  They again waited for my call to go collect two snowballs each to bring back to their desks.




Aim!

Fire!

Then they had to solve for the perimeter and area.  Once everyone had solved, we had another snowball fight returning their two snowballs and retrieving two more.  I had the students each solve 4 problems.

They loved it!

My Little Guy's Birthday and A Great Writing Idea

Today was my youngest son's 7th birthday! We were lucky enough to be able to celebrate together with his class and mine.  His class is our reading buddy class, so he wanted to share cupcakes with my class. We went to their room and enoyed some yummy Steelers (his team) cupcakes.  My class made him this giant birthday card.

While we were in his room I learned a great writing idea from his first grade teacher.  At the beginning of the year she gave each student a circle map to write about themselves and the things that they liked.  Luke's circle graph had: dolphins, nachos, Chinese food, and action figures.  On the student's birthday, she has all of the students write them a letter picking one of these items as their topic to focus on.  Many letters said things about dolphins and nachos, but it was a great way to teach the kiddos to stay on topic.

Here are a few of the letters:

Luke even wrote a letter to himself!

I think I will be stealing this idea for next year, although with my 3rd graders I might have them write a paragraph for each item.

Do you have any ideas for teaching the idea of staying on topic while writing?

Martin Luther King Timeline and Writing Activity

Like many classes across the US we have been learning about Martin Luther King Jr. this week. Yesterday we read Martin's Big Words by Doreen Rappaport.  Then I gave the students copies of the important dates and asked them to choose the four that they thought were most important in describing why we celebrate Martin Luther King Day. I thought it might give them a little practice in picking out main ideas as we seem to still struggle a bit with this skill.

The students colored in pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. and pasted them to the beginning of their paper.  They drew a timeline across and used speech bubbles to write down the events they chose.  Here is what the final product looked like:

Today we worked on our essays comparing our dreams to Martin Luther King Jr.'s dreams. We started with a graphic organizer that looked like this:

Then I asked the students to brainstorm the dreams that they had for their school, their community, and the World.  This is what they came up with:

You can tell that some of their dreams are related to recent news events :(

We used the brainstorms to write a paragraph about each of these dreams.  After the students wrote about their own dreams, we went to the computer lab to research Martin Luther King Jr.'s dreams.  They wrote a paragraph about what they found.  We put the two together for a cute craftivity.

Learning About Frogs - Carousel

We are beginning a research/non-fiction unit on frogs (since we will be getting a class pet soon!). Before I told the kiddos what the unit was about (and what pet we were going to get), I had them complete a carousel activity.  I set up 6 stations around the room with pictures and chart paper. The chart paper was pre-labeled with "What I Notice" and "What I Wonder".

The students worked in groups of 3 and had 3 minutes at each station to talk about what they noticed.  Each group had a different colored marker and wrote down some of their observations and questions.

It was really fun to see what things they noticed (and what things grossed them out!). It was a great way to introduce the unit and get their brains engaged.  They did eventually guess that we would be learning about frogs.

I am working on the complete unit as they work on it, but I will eventually post the final unit to TpT when it is done.  In the meantime, you might want to check out my Can We Get a Pet Unit which kicked off the whole project you see here!

Have you used a carousel in class before? What other engagement ideas do you use?

Listening Center From Donor's Choice and Freebie!

I am on cloud nine! I got my first project funded from Donor's Choice - a listening center.  The items arrived last week and I am loving them!  I have a few students who are very low readers, and they take a lot of my time.  They have a difficult time working independently, and the listening center has changed that!  I set them up with the listening center first thing in the morning which frees me up to meet or conference with other students.  I know that many of you already have listening centers in your classrooms, but I did not have one in the room I have now, and coming from 7th grade math I had no need for one in the past.

Other students have been eyeing the CD/MP3 players and I can't wait to get a few above grade level books such as the Diary of A Wimpy Kid series for them to use and hopefully build their skills as well.

Do you use a listening center in your class?  What do you do with it?

I have this listening center sheet to help hold students accountable for what they are reading  and you can download it here:

Listen to Reading Worksheet

150 Follower Giveaway! Win the Quietest Pencil Sharpener and More!

I know, I know, I am super behind in this, but better late than never right?

I am so appreciative of all of my followers and in honor of that I am hosting a little giveaway!

The prizes include:

 The Quietest Classroom Pencil Sharpener from Classroom Friendly Supplies. I absolutely love mine! You even get to choose the color you like to match your room decor! (Red, blue, green, or black)

 Number Bingo  and a Schoolyard Safari item from Learning is Rosey with Mrs. Josey. Updated! Mrs. Josey is also giving away 2 items of your choice from her store as well!

Two items of your choice from Sara's TPT store. You can find her blogging at Miss V's Busy Bees.

and last but not least, two items of your choice from my TPT store.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Marzano Proficiency Scales

Our district has adopted the use of Marzano Proficiency or learning scales.  I was inspired by this Pinterest pin my own learning scales for my class. Although the original pin was related to behavior modification - it fit what I needed.  Here is what I came up with.  The left side is for our language arts goal and the right side is for our math arts goal.  My principal really wanted to be able to see our scale and be able to ask the students about it when he made his walkthroughs.  I on the other hand felt that although we might be focusing on one particular learning goal during a lesson, we really visit and re-visit several goals and I want the kiddos to understand where they are on the scales for all of them.  So this was a great compromise.  The scale is front and center and easy for both the principal and the kiddos to see at all times with our current goal.  I will take a picture and make copies for the students' binders to refer to throughout the year.



You can find Marzano scales for most of the Common Core Standards at their Proficiency Scale Bank here.