CCES Bathrooms- Design on a Dime Challenge

     Our fourth grade students expressed some concerns with our administration during a lunch before Christmas.  They had the idea to have a Christmas school dance, charge admission, and use the money to fix up the student bathrooms.  That's exactly what took place recently!
     Teachers worked together on teams, using a budget of $100, a can of paint, and some extra money from our own pockets, to design bathrooms for our students.  They turned out awesome!  Here are some pictures from a couple of the bathrooms!  The expressions on their faces were hilarious and they just loved them all!  I need to go around to all eight bathrooms to take pictures- here are some pictures from two of them.

SPACE BATHROOM

We had the picture still taped up so the liquid nails could finish drying- that is a picture of our Assistant Principal, Mr. Nathan, and we were wanting it to look like he was inside the rocket, looking out.  It is the funniest picture and he was such a good sport to let us use it!

When you close the stall door in the space bathroom, music plays like you are going to take off into space!  We also added some glow in the dark planets and stars inside the rocket and some space reading material too.  Our trash can, we transformed into a space alien with LED light antennas.  The two astronauts lights up too!  We had so much fun with this project and glad the kids love them all so much!  

YOU ARE ENTERING PARIS!

These are some pictures of the Paris bathroom on the third floor- such a beautiful job!

Christmas Service Project- Paying it Forward

     Each year at Christmas, we work on a service project in fourth grade in place of exchanging gifts with each other.  The students bring in donations for the Salvation Army and canned goods for a local food pantry.  This year, our students raised almost $100.00 and brought in over 400 canned good items to donate!  We have a special presentation on the last day and the local President of our Salvation Army chapter comes to accept the donation and speak to our students.  The FRYSC also provides milk and cookies for them as a special treat.  It is such a great learning experience and really teaches us that it is better to give than receive!

Listening to Mr. Nettles, our Salvation Army President

This is a picture of my sister and my niece.  They got to visit us for a little while on the last day and have lunch with me at school.  She lives in Kansas and doesn't get to visit often.  I was so excited!

Enjoying some milk and cookies!

Christmas Cafe

One of my treats to my students for Christmas is on the last day, we have a Christmas Cafe and when the students arrive at school, they come in to our room and this is what they see.  It is always one of my favorite memory moments we have throughout the year, because the look on their faces is priceless!  We have breakfast together and watch old-time Christmas movies until our special class time, then we make Christmas ornaments.  It's such a fun day!

   

New Studio 214 Cast Members!

   

     I was working over Christmas break one evening in our room and went to check on our guinea pig before I left to refill her water and give her some more food and to my surprise, she had babies!  There were four in all and so little and cute!

Life as a Snowflake...

     During our weather unit, we reviewed the water cycle and we created an art project with a creative writing piece to explain the process of what happens to a snowflake during the water cycle, with a twist.  The projects turned out really cute!

Instrument Projects

     We are wrapping up our science unit on weather this week and students had to create a weather instrument.  They had the choice of which weather instrument to create and used a rubric to reflect and score themselves.  Then they presented their projects to the class and explained the purpose of their weather instrument and how it was useful for predicted weather.  They did a great job!

"Reading Salad"

     So I was at a meeting a couple weeks ago and another teacher from Owensboro was telling me about a book she uses in her reading class.  I ordered it from Amazon and started reading it and is has the best ideas to increase comprehension!  The first lesson we did was creating a reading salad and I was able to model to the students how we should stop and making connections to our reading when we are reading any type of passage.  I had a couple of helpers to make the salad as I was reading the book "Don't Laugh at Me", which is also a great conversation starter for how we should treat others.  I am using this resource during our RTI time and cannot wait to the rest of the lessons- I know it will make a positive impact!

Here is a copy of the book I'm using to increase student reading comprehension!

Fraction Strips- Van de Wall

     We have started our fraction unit and last week, we created our own fraction strips using colored paper.  We started out with the easier fractions, such as 1/2 and 1/3, then we moved to some tougher ones.  Students had to figure out how to fold their strips of paper to create the fractions and make sure their pieces were equal.  It really stretched their thinking and this came from a math resource written by Van de Wall.  It is great!

Bowling and the Movies

     Before Christmas break, we had some really fun things that took place!  The first was our AR reward for reaching the first two AR goals and students got to go bowling.  They had so much fun!  The second trip was our Dream Dollar Vacation and students got to go watch the new Smurfs movie at LWM on their big screens and have popcorn and drinks.  It was a lot of fun and really felt like you were at a big movie theater, but with two screens!

This video was too funny not to post!  They were having a great time!

5...4...3...2...1... and ACTION!

We are finally back in action in Studio 214!  We've had a technical glitch with the blog, but we got the kink worked out and we are back online.  Thank goodness because we have so many new things to share!  I hope you are having a great January and enjoying the extra days off...