A Columbus Comic (by Louise)

I know so much about Christopher Columbus, and I wanted to show some of it in a child-fun way. So I decided that I would Write and draw a comic on Columbus. I hope after reading it, you will say to yourself, "Wow, I just learned a ton!!" Then please help your self to reading and learning as much as you can about Christopher Columbus. Click on any picture to view it larger!

Why Some People Think Christopher Columbus "Discovered" America (by Zora))

Some people think Christopher Columbus “discovered” America but he really didn’t.  One reason he didn’t is that native people were there for hundreds of years.  Another reason is people like Leif Eriksson sailed to America but just didn’t stop to make settlements.  I guess the reason of that is because the Europeans [the or Spanish] didn’t know about the New World [North America] and accepted Christopher Columbus as the “discoverer” who brought them aware that a continent was there.  Though it’s funny because the Europeans [or the Spanish] thought Christopher Columbus had just come across a much faster and safer way to sail to China.

Thanksgiving!

This Thanksgiving, Class 4-324 is thankful for all the new books we just got from the Scholastic Book Fair! Thanks to your generous donations, we were able to get a variety of fiction and nonfiction books to add to our classroom library. Many of us already took these books home to read over Thanksgiving weekend!

Which books are you most excited about reading? Why? 

Sharing Our Personal Essays!

Edison came up with the COOLEST idea during Writing Workshop today. He's writing his personal essay about how Legend of Zelda Spirit Tracks is the best Legend of Zelda game. And he thought to himself, "When I'm done publishing this, I can take it down to Game Stop! They sell Legend of Zelda Spirit Tracks. I bet other people there would want to read my essay to find out if they would like the game."

As a class, we got pretty excited about his idea, and we started thinking about potential audiences for our personal essays.  

Who do you plan to share your personal essay with you when you are finished with it? 

826nyc and Lots and Lots of Bacon

On Tuesday, we journeyed down to 826nyc for a Storytelling and Bookmaking Program. Volunteers at the center helped us develop our own story titled "Bacon the Hamster vs. Squeaky the Squirrel." After we wrote the first few pages together, we went off to craft our own endings to the story. An illustrator created drawings to match our story. These drawings were bound with the original story and our own endings, so we left with our own original books (complete with our photograph on the back!).

The only downside to the whole trip was Ms. Mildew, the 826nyc publisher who lives deep down in the 14th basement of the building. She was the toughest publisher we've ever encountered. For a while we were concerned that she wouldn't accept our books (she normally doesn't take anything written by children), but after reading our stories she reluctantly agreed they could be approved.

Here are some pictures from our visit. Click on a picture to enlarge it!

What was your favorite part of our trip to 826nyc? How did your story end?

Our Iroquois Skits: Take Eight

As our culminating project for our Iroquois unit, we produced our own short skits and speeches that captured the values, beliefs and traditions of the Iroquois. Here's our eighth skit.

What did you learn about the values, beliefs and traditions of the Iroquois from this skit? 

Our Iroquois Skits: Take Seven

As our culminating project for our Iroquois unit, we produced our own short skits and speeches that captured the values, beliefs and traditions of the Iroquois. Here's our seventh skit.

What did you learn about the values, beliefs and traditions of the Iroquois from this skit? 

Our Iroquois Skits: Take Six

As our culminating project for our Iroquois unit, we produced our own short skits and speeches that captured the values, beliefs and traditions of the Iroquois. Here's our sixth skit.

What did you learn about the values, beliefs and traditions of the Iroquois from this skit? 

Our Iroquois Skits: Take Five

As our culminating project for our Iroquois unit, we produced our own short skits and speeches that captured the values, beliefs and traditions of the Iroquois. Here's our fifth skit.

What did you learn about the values, beliefs and traditions of the Iroquois from this skit? 

Our Iroquois Skits: Take Four

As our culminating project for our Iroquois unit, we produced our own short skits and speeches that captured the values, beliefs and traditions of the Iroquois. Here's our fourth skit.

What did you learn about the values, beliefs and traditions of the Iroquois from this skit? 

Our Iroquois Skits: Take Three

As our culminating project for our Iroquois unit, we produced our own short skits and speeches that captured the values, beliefs and traditions of the Iroquois. Here's our third skit.

What did you learn about the values, beliefs and traditions of the Iroquois from this skit? 

Our Iroquois Skits: Take Two

As our culminating project for our Iroquois unit, we produced our own short skits and speeches that captured the values, beliefs and traditions of the Iroquois. Here's our second skit.

What did you learn about the values, beliefs and traditions of the Iroquois from this skit? 

Our Iroquois Skits: Take One

As our culminating project for our Iroquois unit, we produced our own short skits and speeches that captured the values, beliefs and traditions of the Iroquois. Here's our first skit.

What did you learn about the values, beliefs and traditions of the Iroquois from this skit? 

Math Cartoon

Two partners are having a conversation about multiplication problems in math class, and it's not going very well for them. What advice can you give the partners? What questions could they ask each other? How else could the partners respond? How could you improve the conversation? Leave your suggestions in the comments section! 

If you are interested, you can create your own math comic to feature on our blog!

Teaching our Partners All About the Iroquois

Since we're becoming experts on the Iroquois, we know we can't just keep what we've learned to ourselves. We're learning how to effectively teach our partner what we've learned. Here are some tricks we've already picked up:

1) Use a teaching voice. You've got to sound like an expert when you talk.
2) Have one main focus. Make sure you have lots of evidence to support your focus.
3) Use visuals to support your teaching. You can use visuals that you create in your Social Studies notebook or the visuals from books.

Click play to watch two students teach the class what they've learned about the Iroquois! What did you learn from the videos? What questions do you have for the presenters?

Math Congress: Sharing our Strategies (by Will and Asa)

We made posters in math that showed our thinking on the Teachers' Lounge problems. We showed our strategies on the ELMO, and we told our strategies to the class. We then let the class solve our problems the way we did it. We showed our work using math equations, and then we explained what we did. Everyone learned a lot by our presentations. We learned a new way to solve the problems, like instead of using Partial Products you could use division (Partial Quotients). We had a great time sharing!!!!! Here are some videos of us sharing our strategies.

The Teachers' Lounge

On Monday, we started a new unit called "The Teachers' Lounge." During this unit, we'll explore different situations and conversations that occur in the Teachers' Lounge. Here's our first one: 

Yesterday in the teacher’s lounge, I bumped into the woman that fills the vending machines.  One vending machine holds water, and the other vending machine holds juice.  I was curious about how many bottles the machines each held, and she told me that each machine holds 156 bottles!

The Water Machine

I noticed that there were a bunch of six packs next to the water vending machine—the woman had to tear the packs open in order to fill the machine.  That got me thinking.  I wonder how many six packs the machine will hold?

The Juice Machine

The other vending machine holds juice.  It also holds 156 bottles.  There are six different flavors of juice—apple, cranberry, lemonade, grapefruit, grape and orange.  The machine holds an equal amount of each kind of juice.  I was wondering how many bottles of each flavor fit in the juice machine when it is full?

 

The posters below show our work! Click on a poster to enlarge it!

Natalija and Kate

Wriley and Hadi

Parker and Aiden

Zora and Dante

Arya and Malinee

Jack and Hayden

Fabiano and AJ

Asia and Cheyanne

Josiah and Sofia

Freya and Louise

Greg and Gerrit

Will and Asa

Madison and Veronica

Special Read Aloud: Realistic Fiction Leads

In place of our normal read aloud today, we had a special read aloud period. Today, instead of hearing our normal book, WE had a chance to read the leads of OUR stories aloud! We studied the pros (our mentor texts) to get ideas for leads, and we wrote leads inspired by what they had done. Watch the videos, and enjoy! Be sure to leave us a comment and let us know what we did that hooked you!

These are some of the first videos! I'll upload more later!

Realistic Fiction Story Ideas

We loved having so many of you in the classroom on Friday to read our personal narratives! Thank you for your thoughtful comments. We really enjoyed reading all you wrote!

We're well into our second writing unit: realistic fiction! Here's just a sampling of the stories you'll be able to read. Click on any of the pictures to see the story ideas larger!

New Books!

Thank you for all the beautiful books that have already been donated to our classroom via our Amazon Wish List! It's been so much fun for us to get new books in the mail. These books will be so beneficial for our upcoming nonfiction studies!

Which books are you most excited about reading? Why?

Reading Marathon: Week One

We're sprinting fast toward our goal of reading 200 books as a class! We've already read 61 books! 

What's your favorite book that you've read so far this year? Tell the other readers a bit about it so they can decide if they'd like it too!

Improvisation Class

We started our Improvisation Cycle with Mike and Laura from Freestyle Repertory Theater today!

We learned the two key rules of improv:
1) Always say YES.
2) Always make your partner look good.

To practice these rules, we learned "Pass It," our weekly warm-up game.

We also played the Present Game. You pick up an imaginary present, and you give it to your partner. Your partner has to say YES to your present and make up what it is. You say YES to your partner and make them look good by agreeing with them and adding on details about your present. Presents ranged from folded-up cars to specks of dust!

Teach your family one of the improv games. What did you try? How did it go?