Spirit Week

REMINDER!

Your child needs to return their S.T.A.R reading sheet with their reading goal completed to be able to attend the Skate Party on Tuesday. Sheets HAVE TO BE IN THE OFFICE BY 8:15 ON FRIDAY!

Friday we had our first Awards Assembly. Here are the students that we honored this month.

Our class also won the golden whistle award in P.E. AND the golden book for being so responsible in the library.

We also participated in a short video of our school wide Mustang Moments. This is the "News" that we are broadcasting about every other month. Here CC is acting as the teacher, while JA and CF are acting as the parents in a conference. Come by early during conferences to view these videos on the laptop outside my classroom (10 - 15 minutes early should do it).

Waiting for the Awards Assembly to begin. We were dressed in orange and black to support our decisions to be drug free. Orange you glad to be drug free!

We had such a great time dressing up for Spirit Week! Here is sports day.

Wacky Wednesday

Pajama Day!

The Pumpkin Patch

So much happened last week I got behind. This week I will be posting a lot of pictures to make up for it. Stay tuned. Let's start with the visit to the pumpkin patch.

The Math Challenge

Last week we had some Administrators come through our classroom to experience what it is like to learn in our second and third grade classroom. We have been looking for some competition, so who better than a few "Expression Rookies?" We asked them if they would go against us on our math facts. Thankfully they said, "SURE!" Watch the video below to see how fun learning is.
(Video recorded by CR)

OAKS TESTING

3rd graders will be taking their first math OAKS test this Friday!

Please make sure to get to bed early Wednesday and Thursday night and have nutritious meals. We have looked at the practice test and are ready to give it our best shot. We need a 212 to meet benchmark.

Leadership Opportunites

Mrs. Thorne is so good about letting students lead our school programs.

She came in the other day and asked if we would help teach what Spirit Week is going to be like this year. We quickly accepted and here is what we looked like.

I might be able to upload the video soon of how it all turned out.

A couple reminders:

1. Please keep recording your reading on the S.T.A R sheet, we want to have 100% participation this month. Remember to turn in your sheet by 8:15 on Nov. 5th to be able to attend the skating party.

2. Be collecting pledges for your reading if you want to help raise money for McKay kids.

3. Have fun reading the books that we will use in our Battle of the Books later this winter.

4. Do you have some coats you would like to donate to our Coats For Kids project?

Read A Thon and Cookies

We celebrated great school behavior with TP's famous no-bake cookies (Monkey Moments).

Thank you Mrs. P. (Do you want to share your recipe?)

We kicked of our Read A Thon last week. We are hoping that we can get 100% participation reading. Raising money as we read will be the icing on the cake.
Our second graders wrote the best stories last week. Here is JA with his.

Here is AB reading his story as JA shows his illustration.

This group has been working on this project for weeks and it is finally done.

All Kinds of Reading

Mrs. Thorne came in today so we could teach her how to play our fun math card game.

See if your child can teach you how to play.

Yesterday we met in the library and Mrs. Miltenberger explained S.T.A.R reading.

Second graders are to read 5 hours this month, while third graders are to read 6 hours.

Record your time read each day on the S.T.A.R sheet that comes home tomorrow and then turn it at the end of the month. Students will earn a charm and hopefully fall in love with reading. We will also be participating in a Read A Thon. Sending information on it tomorrow, look in backpacks.

Would you like to see your child's writing? Click on this site and look for their name. We have been working on writing complete sentences with the following criteria:

Begin with capital, end with punctuation, correct spelling, and a complete sentence. We are using the vocabulary words, nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

www.todaysmeet.com/schimel

I will leave this site up so you can pop in from time to time and see our improvement.

Pumpkin Patch!

Yes, we will be going to the pumpkin patch this year. We will be traveling with the kindergartners on October 25th at 8:30. Please send $3 to cover the cost of the pumpkin.

Book Review

KM read this story and made us a Book Review even though it made her really nervous.

Picture Day

Friday is our first Bake Sale of the year. 5th grade families are bring items for us to purchase after lunch. Items sale for .50- $1.00.

Today we had our pictures taken. It was nice to have a mirror to look in first.

September 24, 2010

We worked more on writing complete sentences with the correct punctuation.

These two are always smiling and making us giggle. Students can earn green slips for making choices everywhere around the school. Library, recess, cafeteria, classroom, hallways....

Then on Friday the office staff pulls out a few names and they get to pick out a prize. ZR was our first recipient.
Friday afternoon we had a little time for games.

These girls enjoyed creating with the Dominoes.

Writing

We found a fun way to practice writing different kinds of sentences. We used the site www.todaysmeet.com

We are working on writing statement, command, exclamation, and questions.

Third graders have received spelling lists from Mrs. Oliver, their reading teacher. Lists will come home each Monday and students need to be prepared to take the test on Friday. They will be using www.spellingcity.com

If you have the Internet at home, they may practice online.

Ready to Roll

Now that Round Up is over, we are ready to roll.

Each Monday we will have sharing. I encourage students to NOT bring items in because it just takes too long. We would much rather HEAR about something.

Last week we sent two travel bugs off. We are geocaching in class. We are trying to send these travel bugs to Africa. Ask your child to explain the competition we have going on.
We are working on place value and the importance of the tens and ones columns.

3rd graders are working on place value to the hundreds column and regrouping.

We completed our first scrapbook page too.

Back To School Assembly

Today these girls helped put on the Back to School Assembly.

They each helped wrangle up some miss behaved cowgirls and spoke in the microphone to explain how to be a well behaved cowgirl.
They were confident and had every ones attention.

Good job cowgirls!

At each assembly a class is chosen for good assembly behavior....and we won the very first one!

Are we awesome or what?

Well we made it through the first week of school and I think it went pretty well.

Once activity we completed this week was our cartoon faces. Here is AB painting his.This is TP finishing his up.
TS and MA enjoying a book together.

We used the Promethean board and it's dual pen mode to practice a little handwriting.

Then Friday afternoon we used the AlphaSmarts to write our first newspaper article.
I will be printing them on Tuesday, so if you would like a colored copy, please send in your $10 subscription fee (if you haven't already).

The second graders took their first reading test using the expressions this week too.

Here they are celebrating that they all got the question right. Oh, I can tell this is going to be a really good school year. Aren't they cute and fun?

We also got the computer station working. Today we used the computers to listen to some stories online.

It was a great week and I can't wait to see what next week brings.