Room 132

We just finished our school year.  We learned a lot of different things over the school year, and I just know that the kids are looking for something to do in order to keep their skills sharp.  So, parents, here are things you can direct your children to do whenever they are foolish enough to tell you that they’re bored.

Language Arts:

• Find any of this year’s Spelling City lists here
• Kerpoof! Create a picture, then make up a story about it!
• Grammar Ninja

Math:

• Math Games at Arcademic Skill Builders
• Math Games at TutPup
• Online math flashcards
• Practice telling time on an analog clock
• Print out tons of different kinds of math worksheets at Superkids

Science:

• Wellhead Willy’s Water Cycle Arcade
• Virtual Forest Challenge

Social Studies:

• Learn about the states and their capitals

Reading:

• Go to the library or bookstore and read a book! Read books together with your parents, read them alone, have your parents read some to you.  I suggest you try out something new, but if you liked the books we read this year, Sharon Draper wrote Ziggy and the Black Dinosaurs, Caroline B. Cooney wrote Wanted!, and Christopher Paul Curtis wrote The Watsons Got to  Birmingham, 1963.

Have a great Summer, everybody!  See you in September!

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Things have been super-busy around here since we got back from Spring Break.  Here are some pictures showing what we’ve done in the last week or so.  Click on the pictures to see larger images.

We’re going back to visit the first graders in a couple of weeks.  This week we picked out the picture books we’re going to read to them.  Here you can see our classroom with everybody spread out so they can practice reading out loud without disturbing everybody else.

One of the things we’ve been learning about recently is estimation.  Some of the students were having a hard time understanding it, so I introduced them to Mama duck and her ducklings, trying to get across the road to get to a loaf of bread.  If she sees a car coming, should she turn around and go back, or keep moving forward?  We figured that if she’s more than halfway, she should keep going.  Then we looked at how we can do the same thing with money to estimate to the nearest dollar.

Finally, Happy Mother’s Day to all of the classroom Moms out there.  My class is very lucky to have some great, involved parents.  The kids made these flower boxes in art class and we held them in the classroom so they could be taken home for Mother’s Day this weekend.

PS: I promised the kids that I’d post a link to the website we played some fun math games on this afternoon.  You can find the games here at Arcademic Skill Builders.

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Today for Earth day we played a really fun game called the Virtual Forest Challenge.  We had to answer some tricky questions about the best thing to do for our planet and also had to play some mini games about picking items at the store and picking up trash in a park.  We did really well on the questions, but the games were hard and fast.  The class’s score with Mr. Callahan on the mini games was 42%, but Mr. Callahan is pretty sure that the students can get higher scores than that if they play the games.

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