Christmas Service Project

Family Resource Staff and their special helpers!

Guest speaker, Mr. Bud Nettles, with his grandson, Colby

Mrs. Parson's Homeroom enjoying their special treat provided by FRYSC!

Mr. Bud Nettles, Christmas Service Project Guest Speaker

I am so extremely proud of our fourth grade students! This year, like last year, we completed a service project to help others instead of exchanging gifts. For two weeks, students brought in canned goods to donate to our local food pantry and they brought in money to donate to our local chapter of The Salvation Army. The last day of school before Christmas break started, we had a little gathering and had a representative of the Salvation Army, Bud Nettles, come share with us what their donation would be used for in our community and the story behind St. Nick. Our Family Resource staff provided milk and cookies for all of our students after the guest speaker. We appreciate our guest speaker and the help of our FRYSC!

Our students brought a total of 441 canned goods and $235.10! Way to go fourth graders- what an example you have set for all of us to follow and you make all of us so proud!

Student of the Week- Matthew

This weeks Student of the Week goes to Matthew! Matthew, thank you for all your hard work- Studio 214 is so proud of you! Keep it up!

Christmas Performance

Ms. Karen Hagan, our art and music teacher, worked with a group of twenty students from CCES over the past two weeks in preparation for a special Christmas Musical. They performed this morning at our morning assembly and what a great job they did! We had two members from Studio 214 who participated in the play- check out their performance! Way to go Lauren and Daylin!

Pictures from our Christmas Festivities!

Here are some more pictures from our Christmas Day festivities!

Students as "Teachers"

Students were given an opportunity to be the "teachers" during a task we completed this week with open responses. Last week, teachers in our school building scored open responses. Each student response was scored twice and students were given feedback on the things they did well and things they could do better.

We completed another open response this week. Kids in Studio 214 did the same thing as the teachers last week, using a scoring rubric and score sheets. I was very impressed with their feedback! This is a task we are going to continue to do for the remainder of the school year to improve our writing and learn how to critique our own writing responses.

Ms. Jingles Visits Studio 214

Ms. Jingles (Barbara Booher) visited us from the public library this week. She sung some Christmas carols with the kids and they read a story. It was a lot of fun and we appreciate Ms. Barbara visiting our class!

Christmas Memories @ the Cafe!

Electric Kettle: $29.99
Christmas Decorations: $40.00
Hot Chocolate and Doughnuts: $22.00
Special Treats for the Class: $30.00
The look on their faces when they entered the "Christmas Cafe": PRICELESS!

Students in Studio 214 had a wonderful Christmas breakfast together this morning. When they entered the room, all our lights were out and our room was completely lit with candle light (battery operated) and our Christmas light decorations. I always look forward to this tradition with my kids and it is my hope that we have created some memories that will last a lifetime. Merry Christmas to all!

Their reaction...

Here is what they saw...

Book Talk- Savannah

Savannah just finished reading "The Wind in the Willows" by Kenneth Graham. Savannah chose this book first because of it's attractive cover- it looked really cool! Why would this frog dress like a lady? Read on to find out!

Book Talk- Taylor

Our most recent book talk was completed on the book "Thanksgiving Turkey Trouble" by Abby Kelin. This if from the Reddy Freddy series. Taylor rated this book a 5 out of 5 because it was funny and exciting. Her favorite character was Suzie because she made Freddy do what she wanted because she did him a favor. Read this book to find out what Freddy did at the end!

Book Talk- Skylar

Skylar just finished reading the KY Bluegrass book "Wild Girl" by Patricia Reilly Giff. She said it's the type of book that when you pick it up and start reading, you can't stop because it is so good! If you love horses, this is a great book for you!

It's the Most Wonderful Time!

Just a reminder- don't forget to send in your $1 donation for the Salvation Army by Friday and to send your canned goods to donate to our local food pantry! I just want to take a moment and thank everyone for your support with this project. More pictures will be coming soon along with our final count of all the money raised and a total of all the canned goods collected. Keep them coming- it's for a great cause and teaches us a meaningful lesson!

FRYSC Ornaments

Our family resource staff gave all the elementary classrooms a nice set of Christmas ornaments at the beginning of the school year! They are so nice and the kids just love them! We took some time as students were preparing to leave this afternoon to begin personalizing their ornaments and will finish them next week in time for Christmas break. The sets came with gift bags, a beautiful ornament, and a pen to personalize each ornament. A special thank you goes out to our Family Resource Team for providing this gift to us!

Blooms Task

While searching the web one weekend, I found this idea from a neighboring district and thought it was so cool! When we finished one of our class read-alouds, we completed this Bloom's Taxonomy task on our book. The book we read was "No Talking", by Andrew Clements, which is really funny! The task itself was completed in partners and the students complete a task for each level of Bloom's Taxonomy and then piece their tasks together to make a ball. We hung them out in the hall to display.

Here is the site for the template to create the ball. Have the students write on the inside and then cut the circle out and you use the straight lines to fold to connect the pieces.

http://www.juddweb.net/bcps/gigowski/bloomball.htm

Student of the Week

For the week of December 5-9, our student of the week in Studio 214 is Miss Maleigha! Whoo- Whoo!!!

Student of the Week

JP was our student of the week for November 28-December 2. Keep up the good work, JP!

Super AR Reader!

On November 30, Hannah reached 100 Accelerated Reader points for this school year! Way to go- we are so proud of you!

"Kentucky School Advocate" Article

Here is the link to an article that was recently published about our school and the steps we have taken to conserve energy! It's a cool article- thank you Lauren for bringing a copy to share with us!

http://www.ksba.org/2011DecemberAdvocate.aspx

Christmas Shopping on a Budget

This morning we went Christmas shopping using our local sales papers! Students were given $100 each (imaginary money) to purchase gifts for all their family and friends. They could pruchase anything from the sales papers as gifts, but they had to stay within their $100 budget. Once they had figured out the total amount of money spent, they had to subtract to find how much change they would get back from a one hundred dollar bill. Some students were challenged to find the tax cost of their purchase. During our discussion of our task and looking at some receipts of recent real-life shopping trips, students said they did not realize so much math was used just to go shopping! One student stated after he finished shopping and figuring up his total money spent that he had a headache and that shopping was stressful- my husband thinks the same thing! We had so much fun with this task and I think they will look at their next trip to IGA, the Dollar Store, or Walmart a little differently!

Factor Christmas Trees

Today for our "Winter Wonderland Hands-On Wednesday", we completed some hands-on tasks, one of which was creating factor trees. We used Christmas trees to create our factor trees. Students were given a product, typed on a star, and they had to find all of the prime factors of that number by creating the factor tree. We are going to use the trees for another task later to find the greatest common factors of two given products.

Book Talk- Cameron

Cameron just finished the newly released book "Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever" by Jeff Kinney. This book is part of a series and the main character is Greg. The book begins at Greg's house and Greg talks about how it's not fair when other people get hundreds of gifts and he only gets one! Greg gets into some huge trouble at school! Read on to see what happens!

Layers of the Earth

With our Earth Materials unit, we have just wrapped up our discussion on the layers of the earth and fossils. Listen as Isaac explains the layers from the model we created using play-dough.

Give One, Get One Thoughtful Ed. Strategy

This morning after watching a Bill Nye video on Fossils, students made notes throughout and then we completed a "Give One, Get One" task, where students share the notes they made from the video with partners. We used clock partners to share our ideas so students had a chance to work with peers other than the ones they usually sit with throughout each day. The goal of the task is to gather as many ideas as possible and it reinforces what they learned because they are explaining it and writing it more than once. They created a t-chart in their science journals with the headings of "Give One, Get One" to record their information.

More Multiplication Properties

Here are a couple more properties...

Properties of Multiplication

In math, we have been studying the properties of multiplication. When we talked about what each property meant, the students created hand motions to put with each vocabulary word. This helps us remember the meaning and makes it easier to apply. The properties we have been studying are the zero property, communative property, associative property, identity property, and the distributive property. Check it out!

Book Talk- Hannah

Hannah just finished reading the new book from Scholastic called "Pie" and was written by Sarah Weeks. It is a very suspensful book with a surprise twist! She just couldn't put it down and read it in a couple of days! I'm going to add this one to my list of must reads!

Story Web

In reading we have been learning about story structure and how that relates to fiction stories. For our totally hands-on Tuesday, we created a story web where students had to add to our story piece by piece. When a student added a piece to our story, they threw the yarn ball to that person and hung on to the string. Our story got a little silly with all the zombies that came into the mix, but it was fun and great to see the rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution coming to life through their imaginations!

Write Chats

Write chats (or sometimes called Placemat Concensus) is a great way for students to write each other notes in class, without getting in trouble, and discussing topics related to what we are learning in class! Take a poster and write the topic in the center and then let them write away! They can respond to each other's writing and even add new questions to ask each other as long as it is focused on the topic. It's also very quiet, because they have to complete the task without talking! We completed this write chat on Thanksgiving Traditions since we were getting ready to get out of school for our Thanksgiving Holiday Break!

Science Journals

Take a look at our table of contents for our science journals! As you can see, we are working hard and documenting our findings and wonderings in our science and math journals. By keeping a table of contents in our journals, it makes it really easy to find certain topics! A special thanks goes to Cameron for sharing his journal with us!

Edible Soil

On our Totally Hands-On Tuesday, we created edible soil to go along with what we have studied recently in science. We finished up Science Court yesterday and have been discussing the layers of soil, with bedrock being on the bottom, then subsoil, and then humus. Here are some pics from our edible layers and we added a few worms as well!

If you would like to make this at home, we used graham crackers as the bedrock, pudding as the subsoil, and crumbled oreos as the humus. We used gummy worms for the worms on top and we discussed how worms provide nutrients to the humus.

Book Talk- Zoe

Zoe did a book talk on the book, "Diary of a Wimpy Kid- Rodrick Rules". Read this book- it's great!

Soil Experiment

We conducted a soil experiment today after learning about the layers of the soil. In the containers above we had the substances of clay, sand, and humus soil. We drew the layers in our science journals and discussed how the bedrock is the bottom layer, with subsoil on top of that. Then we have top soil and humus. Humus is made of decaying plants and animals and contains lots of nutrients for the plants to grow. We discussed which type of substance would be the best to grow plants.

Next week, we are going to create edible layers to eat with worms (gummy, of course)!

Student of the Week- Savannah

This weeks Student of the Week goes to Savannah! Whoo Whoo!

Weathering and Erosion Experiment

This is what we observed after leaving our experiment out for a few days. The mountain started to crack where the sand was stuck, demonstrating what happens with weathering.

This week we have been discussing weathering and erosion. It takes hundreds of years to see the effects of weathering and erosion, but we did a speedy version in class using clay, sand, water, and "wind". The wind got a little slobbery, but it still worked! lol

Are there any places around your home that you can find to identify the effects of weathering and erosion?