We made our goal!

All we can say is thank you, thank you, thank you! We reached our goal for the portable external hard drive in just three short days:) Now I will be able to download as many objective related applications as needed to make learning fun and interactive. Words are not enough to express our sincere gratitude!

Although it has been a short week; we have been very busy the past two to three days:

We are learning about polar animals and nonstandard measurement. We have been working on adding thoughts and ideas to our "alpha-idea" chart so that when we are writing we will have a resource to help think of great writing topics. We highlighted all the high frequency words that are already on our word wall during phonics and word block.

Today we:

We did gymnastics in P.E. (Adam)
We are sorting objects by their states of matter. (Paisley)
Tomorrow is a "what do you want to be when you grow up" day! (Zach)
The four people who went to speech today practiced "S" and "R" sounds. (Xander)
We had partners and we measured with different objects around the room. (Caroline)
We discovered that Rosalie's head is 20 1/2 inches around, Daniel was 20 1/2", and Izzy was 20". (Zach)
We came up with more ideas for our alpha-ideas chart. (Zach)
We cheered and chanted "here" and "if" and four people got to show how to write these words in their best d'nealian letters on the active board!

We need your help!

We are so excited to be finished with quarterly assessments. We are sorry for not blogging the past couple of days but we have been very busy. One of the most exciting things happening in our classroom this week was when we got a brand new active board. Mrs. Ziegler had to move all kinds of things around to make everything fit so it almost feels like we have a brand new classroom. However in order to put our active board to use we will need a portable external hard drive to hold all of the many applications that will meet our learning objectives. We have found one on-line that is listed for approximately $100.00 (depending on where you do your shopping). It is called a Seagate Free Agent Go and has 500 GB. We are hoping that with the help of parent contributions that we will be able to make this purchase very soon. Hope you have a great three day weekend!

Here is a quick review of what we have been doing this week:

In phonics and word block we had our spelling test on "ope" words. (David)
There were so many tests! (Izzy)
In music we learned a new song about Martin Luther King Jr. (Paisley)
Our test words were telescope and nope and rope and dopey and.... (Zach)
Yesterday we went to P.E. and we played dodge ball. (Caroline)
We went to Mrs. Bryant's room yesterday because there were men in our room to move bulletin boards, white boards and active boards. (Jordan and Izzy)
When we were in Mrs. Bryant's room we had inside recess, we did phonics and word block, and helped her score a story using the star rubric. (Caroline, Anne, and Zach)
We did some writing with Mrs. Bryant. (Keaira)
We had auction today! (Jane)
At shared reading we read a book called Three Cheers for Tacky. (Murphy)
We finally got to do our blog. (Julia)
We finished the rest of our math test yesterday. (Daniel)

As Jane says "A lot of work"

We thought we were going to have to check our books out at the end of the day but since they finished testing early we got to go to the library. (Paisley)
We did our estimation jar and the number was 51. (Jordan)
Mrs. Ziegler was only one away from the actual number when she made her estimation. (Izzy)
A lot of people in our class estimated 50. (Jane)
In phonics and word block we learned two new words: find and away (Caroline)
Kearia is our star student his week. (Genesis)
George left a little early but he got to bring home the estimation jar. (Julia)
We learned about Martin Luther King Jr. (Daniel)
In shared reading we learned that Martin Luther King Jr. had a friend he couldn't play with because his friend was white. (Xander)
Me and Izzy went to math and then poetry station. In the math station we sorted dominoes by their colors. (Izzy and Adam)
We learned about plural nouns like teeth, geese, mice, men and women. (a bunch of us)

*Giggle moment*
Izzy did not know how to spell her name.
Jane said we should call our blog "a lot of work"

Question for Parents:

When is Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birthday?

T.G.I.F!!!

We are getting a new Active Board for our classroom! (Caroline)
We had a new music teacher in the music room she will a student teacher. (Daniel)
We brainstormed our new spelling words. (Jane)
We learned about one more mystery composer in music. One of the clues was that "he was born in 1685.(Adam and Jane)
Mrs. Ziegler and Mrs. Mowad are checking our star story rubrics to make sure we have earned all the stars we can. (Caroline)
We compared a hexagon and a trapezoid in math today. (Xander)
We finally got to do our blog. (Julia)
We had learning stations. (Adam)
We are reading Pippi Longstocking as our read aloud. (David)
This week for Shared Reading we were reading about the Emperor penguin who can be as big as four feet. (Zach)

Playing "catch-up"

Dear Parents,

First we would like to apologize for not blogging the past several days. Mrs. Ziegler was out on Friday for a planning day, Monday because her son was sick and we were so busy playing "catch-up" yesterday that we just didn't have the time! So after brainstorming as a class we wanted to share the following things with you to let you know what has been going on in our classroom:

In the computer lab we stamped a picture of polar animals and got to print them out.
We finally got to share our shape pictures that we made way back in November.
We have been learning about penguins and Mrs. Mowad brought a stuffed penguin collection from home!
Yesterday we got to go to a Yo-Yo show.
We went to library to check out new books yesterday.
We had Spanish on Monday.
We have had a lot of fun chanting our word wall words to the tune of "cha cha cha" during phonics and word block this week.
We wrote about how to make a snowman.
We started using a rubric to check our papers in writing.
Emperor penguins and and king penguins do not build nests.
An emperor penguin and Kearia are about the same size.
The emperor penguin can dive 1500 feet.
The smallest penguin is called the fairy penguin.
There are 17 different kinds of penguins.

Question for Parents: (please respond with a comment)

What do you know about penguins?

Another cold day

I had a hard time showing 81 cents with our magnetic coins. (Caroline)
We learned about adjectives. (Anne)
We went to P.E. and played dead ants.(George)
In P.E. we played another game called hoop ball. (Daniel)
Three people went to speech today. (Xander)
Mrs. Ziegler shared with us what a 100 block looks like and what a 1,000 block looks like. (Paisley)
Jordan was absent.(Anne)
Today we learned two more words for our word wall. (Adam)
The ice left outside for our science experiment partially melted by the end of the day. (Genesis)
We finished our first science experiment. (David)


Note from Mrs. Ziegler: I will try to work on the video again tonight, George's mom gave me a tip that might be helpful however I won't have a chance to work on it until after 7:30 so it might be later tonight!:)


*giggle moment*
At the very end of the day a little boy from another classroom came in and asked to see Mattie. When we told him where she was he looked a her and waved and then left.

Question for parents: (please respond with a comment)

We put two ice cubes outside. One by the flag pole in the direct sunlight and one in the shade. Zach wants to know which ice cube do you think melted the most?

Tongue Twisters!

Today was another very fun day. Students got to read their tongue twisters for Mrs. Ziegler's new flip camcorder and can be viewed in this very blog! We began a science experiment to answer a question posed by Zach; What will happen to an ice cube if it is left outside on a day with temperatures below freezing? Due to an accidental interference from some other students on their way to recess, we will have to try our experiment again tomorrow. We worked on our calendar skills as well as using mathematical logic/reasoning to solve some "winter" mysteries. Rosalie's mom was our mystery guest. Of course, we can't forget to mention how much fun all the students had with their toys during inside recess today, they were truly deserving of this compliment party! Below are the tongue twisters composed by each student followed by a video of each student reading. Enjoy!

Busy, Busy, Busy!

We did not have time to do our blog together today! We had a very busy but VERY PRODUCTIVE day. We began by checking our daily language and math workbook. We learned why it is important to know your doubles addition facts. We cheered and chanted two new words for our word wall and read a few more tongue twisters. We especially enjoyed reading the tongue twisters that were added as comments to yesterday's blog...thank you so much for helping to make learning fun! After reviewing the five rules to a simple sentence, students then wrote their own tongue twister using their name and will be able to type and print their tongue twister in the computer lab tomorrow. We talked about analog clocks and will spend more time on "telling time" over the next several days. The most exciting part of our day was that we had our very first scientist meeting of the year. Each student received their science journal and we began by writing our wonder questions for the year. Zach came up with a question that we will use for our very first experiment...tomorrow! We are all very excited. Thanks again for submitting your tongue twisters, we'll share student tongue twisters tomorrow.

A New Year!

After a wonderful two week break we were all very excited to come back to school for 2010! Our day was very busy and we didn't' spend much time with Mrs. Ziegler or Mrs. Mowad because we had so many other things planned like guidance, book buddies, Spanish and art.


We finally got to see Mrs. Durham and talked about caring, helping, and filling up buckets. (Jane and Anne)

We got to write a sentence about how we can help others in 2010. (Jordan)

We learned about caring for people. (Kearia)

My book buddy read a book about a girl who was striped and she ate some kind of bean and got all better. (Caroline)

We thought of our new spelling words for the "ake" family. (Izzy)

We painted our hands in art and printed them down on a black piece of paper. (Daniel)

We reviewed the five rules to a sentence and read a book with tongue twisters to see if they were real sentences or not. (Paisley)

We had book buddies.

We shared about our Christmas break. (Julia)

We got our names transferred in Spanish and my name was Pepe. (Jordan)

We wrote our names in Spanish on little cards and then we got to decorate them. (Jane)

It wasn't as cold as we expected and we stayed out longer than planned but we still came in early. (Daniel)

There was a bunch of ice outside. (Paisley)

We got to play Sparkle with our word wall words.

We got to write a sentence about fact families. (Jordan)

We did an activity called handful of cubes and came up with a HUGE list of fact families.

Question for parents (please respond with a comment):

Will you please write and share a tongue twister with your name in it? Remember a tongue twister is a sentence in which most words begin with the same letter such as "Rachel ran a rapid race with wheels".