Merry, Merry

Our days before the holiday break were filled with Christmas songs, ugly sweaters, great holiday stories, holidays around the world, jammies, treats, and best friends.  We had STEM projects, art lessons, ornament crafting, read ins, and so much more.  It's hard to blog about each activity, so here is just a few photos to enjoy.  Hope you all have a fantastic break!  See you in 2019!

Like Totally 80's

These decade days rock!  80's day was radical!  Righteous even! Music was rocking all day.  Of course, if you know me at all, it wasn't just a dress up day....we used the theme to experience rigorous academics in a tubular way!

With so much neon, I got out the black lights.  We started the day with a multiplication word/equation find.  Highlighter really pops in the black light.  The students bopped all morning, working on academics with 80's music.  We also used the highlighters to analyze words.  The students had cards with interesting vocabulary words and context clues.  Students had to figure out what the vocabulary words meant using (and highlighting) the evidence.

 
After highlighting so many context clues, we played vocabulary GLOW tic-tac-toe.  The students worked so incredibly hard to analyze words and provide contextual evidence.

For math, we warmed up with the best number of the 80s. Students had to think of as many equations as they could for 867-5309.  They could use addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division.



Next, we played multiplication Jenga.  Students had to take a block like in regular Jenga; however, the blocks were color coded and every color represented a multiplication problem to solve.  We are looking for as many different ways possible to practice our multiplication facts.



Happy 80th day of school!  I'm one lucky teacher to spend these milestones with a terrific bunch of students.

 

Grinch Day!

 Here at Eagle Cliffs we LOVE Grinch Day!  This year was filled with the best Who-dress and kind hearts.  For Grinch Day 2018, the Magic of Threes had a break out to work on.  To unlock the Grinch box, students had to solve a series of clues.  This is our 4th break out this year.  Students are really understanding how to work as a team and solve clues.  It is fun to hear them strategizing.

We also used the day to study similes and metaphors.  The Grinch song is packed full of them!  The students made a Grinch drawing in SeeSaw and wrote a caption with their own similes.  Here are a couple great examples.



At the end of the day, we had some Grinchy fun with our kindergarten buddies.  We made slime!  Just look at the smiles for miles!  Sticky, slimy, messy fun!  What a fabulous Grinch day!

Hour of Code

We are up for this challenge again this year.  We love to code.  Click start to begin writing your lines of code.

START

We celebrated "Computer Science Education Week."  The week was declared to bring computer science into schools and promote student interest in coding.  The Magic of Threes wrote over 2000 lines of code.  I see some future programmers in this class.  Click here to be linked to the challenges we worked on in class.  The students had to solve puzzles to program characters through mazes.  While they thought they were "playing" they were programming with loops, conditionals, and algorithms.  Students used logic and problem solving skills.  The challenges also tested their persistence and "I can" attitude.  As the students moved up in levels, the students received video tutorials by gifted computer scientists in the field like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.  Thank you to our Eagle Cliffs tech, Mr. Carter, for coming in and helping us!  We loved having our resident expert inside our classroom.



In addition to using code.org we also did some unplugged coding that went with our Candy Land theme.  I love watching the students think through coding challenges.

The "Hour of Code" just kicked off our computer science work.  We will continue coding in the new year.  I have lots of fun challenges in store including our Osmo coding blocks and introducing the students to our classroom robots Dash and Dot.  Stay tuned!

Candy Land Magic

It was the week before testing and what better way to review than... a Candy Land transformed classroom.  The students definitely had visions of sugar plums, but also worked with standards like vocabulary context clues, making inferences, fluency, multiplication, and more!

One of the students' favorite Candy Land reading activities was a fluency exercise.  With a fluency partner, students were given different nonfiction cards.  The students read the cards three times with their partners focusing on accuracy, rate, and expression.  When they were done with fluency readings, the students had to answer a question from the text.  Then, the partners traded cards for a new piece of text.



In math, the students also had several activities in the theme.  Students played Candy Land with a multiplication twist.  Each color on the game board represented a count by, for instance, a blue card meant count by 3's.  Before students could move their gingerbread man they had to skip count by that number.  Students got a lot of practice and they thought they were playing a game!  We also had candy themed word problems.  Check out SeeSaw for some more of our Candy Land posts!