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, 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 2020!

Like Totally 80s!

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 Connect Four.  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.

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. 

In addition to working on code.org, we started coding our class robots Dash and Dot.  The students are in love with these cute little robots and what they can make them do.  We will certainly code into the new year.  The students love the challenge.

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 2019, the Magic of Threes celebrated with our kindergarten buddies.  We read the book on the whiteboard and together made a Grinch craft.  Then, we helped our buddies write a sentence about how they could make the Grinch grin.  We also used the story to study similes and metaphors.  The Grinch song is packed full of them! Happy Grinch-mas!

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!