And the Mosaics GROW...

 It dawned on me tonight that I haven't posted the latest pictures of our Mosaic work.  Here we are putting the finishing touches on our small "take-home" mosaics. For a full explanation of our project, visit this post.  

 And then we got to make the "big" ones with our artists' help.  Lindsey and Chitra, we think you ROCK!  We worked in teams of three to put the stones and glass into our mosaic tiles.  The artists reminded us that mosaics should have space in between the pieces.  They also let us put in the stones that we painted.  Mr. Dragon even stopped by to look at our handiwork.  These beautiful pieces are going to become part of our Courtyard at school.  We are excited to share them with the rest of the Southside community!  

More Mosaic Work...

Today was "make your own" mosaic tile day!  Each child was able to put their knowledge about this art form to work to create their own individual stone.  We used cement, glass beads and stones for this work.  They even brought one for Mrs. Nations to make!  Enjoy the pictures of this fun and ongoing art lesson.  

And in other news, we have really been working on story sequencing this week using fiction books.  Today we made our first B,M,E (Beginning Middle and End) retelling page.  

Here is an example from The Runaway Pumpkin:  

This Blog Post is SO "Last Week"!

Can you tell I have teens in my life by me giving this post THAT title?  Seriously, I have been trying for nearly a week to do a blog update and it keeps getting pushed to the back burner.  So, I thought the title was very appropriate, because it's QUITE true!

Still, our learning last week was important and FUN.  I don't want to miss sharing it with you.  Make sure you scroll all the way to the bottom so you can see every bit of our busy week (well a lot of our busy week).

Our mosaic project with our Ringling Art Students continued last week.  Students painted their own stones that will be used in the garden stones we are making to leave here at Southside.

 Some of these stones even say "Yea!" on them because we say "Yea for YEA!"  This has been an amazing project and SO CONNECTED to our thinking and learning!  I can't WAIT to see the finished products.

 Did you know that almost every single day your child meets in a small guided reading group?  This is a time when we read and think our way through text that is at an appropriate level for your young learner.  It's fun to watch them navigate new texts.  This week we will begin more writing in response to this reading and more word work where we are digging into words, how they sound and what they mean.

 With the Fall has come MANY favorite read alouds.  I think this one will remain at the top of our list for a while.  It's a fun innovation on "There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly".  We read it, talked about the characters and made a character map to go with our story.  Here's our character map:

 Part of the task with this project was to put the characters in order and work together to spell their names.  We used this as both comprehension and guided writing.

 And here are our completed stones for our mosaic tiles:

 Check out our bats!  This was a fun addition to our room for "bat week".

 Then the students created their own paintings during one rainy recess last week.  The only requirement was that there was a bat or a spider somewhere in the picture.  They are GORGEOUS!

 As we learned about bats, we found out that one bat can eat about 600 mosquitos in ONE HOUR.  So here we are creating a visual so we can see just how many bugs that is in our cooperative groups.  Everyone cut and everyone glued them to the plates.

After seeing our visual, we decided that we are quite thankful for bats!!

Visitors, Schema Building and Mosaics...Oh My!

Last Thursday was America's Read for the Record Day.  My teacher colleague (and co-author) was on campus and came to visit our classroom.  Mrs. Waite came and read a Llama Llama book to us.  The Read for the Record book was "Llama, Llama Red Pajama" by Anna Dewdney.  Mrs. Smith read it on the morning news IN her red pajamas!  Then, Mrs. Waite came and read "Llama Llama Misses Mama" to us later in the day.  It was great to hear two books by the same author--and from two different readers!

We also had some Math Fun with our spider rings.  Students were given ten spider rings and we rolled the dice.  They could add that number to their fingers.  The goal was to see who could fill up their fingers the fastest.  Next week, we'll be playing this game during math centers on our own.  

 Sorry for the sideways view of our Itsy Bitsy spider houses.  This is how we practiced the text we  learned last week.  Students read it to me aloud and tried to point to the words if they could.  If not, I checked to see if they were moving their fingers left to right and top to bottom.  This is a sure sign they know the concepts about print.  It was a fun way to practice this skill.

 And, if that wasn't enough fun...we got to meet our "Learning Buddies" from fourth grade on Friday.  Mrs. Abshire's class will be coming to meet with us each week from 2:30 until 3:00 on Fridays.  Last week we learned the song "I Whistle a Happy Tune" from The King and I.  We talked about emotions and what we do when we're scared.  All the students started sketching a picture of their schema for this song.  This week, we will be painting with our fourth grade buddies to show what we do when we're afraid.

 Today...our artist friends from Ringling College came to visit us again.  We once again visited the art form of mosaics and talked about how we can form our own picture using mosaics.  Today we made pumpkins.  Each child created his or her own picture and then filled it in using appropriate mosaic pieces.  We connected this to the way our brains work when we little little bits of information.  We know that it all comes together to make an amazing picture!  Scroll all the way down to see our "pumpkin patch"!

And finally today we are starting to wrap up our schema chart for our spider learning.  We have read many of the wonderful books in our classroom and the ones that you've sent in.  And they are FULL of interesting info about these creatures.  After revisiting our spider schema chart, each learner added to his or her reading journal the words "I learned..." and wrote what they learned about spiders.